


find me at sea (and tell me why you never loved me)

by blackestofmarkets



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 10:14:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12579460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackestofmarkets/pseuds/blackestofmarkets
Summary: The night before Hallow's Eve, Dave leaves. All Saints Day, Dirk is found. This is a calling out into the void of everything we knew.Alternatively titled: Three years, the ocean and escapism.





	find me at sea (and tell me why you never loved me)

 

THE airport at LAX is as horrid as it always tends to be whenever he catches a flight there. Stale air, endless chatter and fluorescence over the underfeed of baseline announcements and the _thunk-thunk-thunk_ of wheels over standardized-colour PVC linoleum. Somewhere in the distance he can smell the siren song of what is either a really shitty Starbucks or a really average Costa Coffee, but at this wee hour in the morning, even he has no stomach for coffee. There is a distinct scent of airport restaurants and cheap, pre-packaged food in the air. The thought of indulging in one of Auntie Annie’s trans fat saturated pretzel bites is usually one of the customary rituals whenever he boards for Washington, but today it only nauseates him into restlessness.

The uneasy coil down his throat and into his oesophagus, the smell of re-used frying oil and tap-water calcified coffee. The neon lights bathing all of them in some sort of uncanny glow, highlighting each and every wrinkle and crease on clothing and faces alike. The look on Rose’s face when he tells her he doesn’t need to be accompanied to the gate.

 

The joke about being a fluorescent adolescent falls flat in front of her muted disapproval. At five in the morning even she looks tired in the glow of the sign they part under . Somewhat absently he notes the little crack in the lower left hand of it, distorting the capital _D_ of _Departures_. It looks more like _Bepartures_ now and he’s not sure if that’s just a really bad coincidence or some pseudo-divine holistic order from whoever is watching. He won’t admit to hoping it’s Karkat, but some part inside of him, carefully folded three ways and shoved under the cockles of this brave new world, can’t help wondering if it is. Can’t help wondering _how_ it is. How they are.

_Be partures._

 

He tells her it won’t be for long, tells her if he isn’t successful he’ll come back as soon as possible and they both know it’s a lie. But she’s gracious enough to refrain from calling him out on it. She’s always been good in that department and the decade or so they’ve spent welded into each other’s company has only heightened her sensibility for the opportune moment. Even at this time, Rose is put together immaculately, black coat over teal suit jacket neatly tucked into her slacks. Her heels click briskly when she comes to a halt and he notes with surprising familiarity that she still straightens her back whenever she has to stand for a few minutes, curve her spine and bend her knees to avoid hunching her shoulders. He himself has yet to be broken out of that habit, even at ten years older and a broader frame than he ever envisioned on himself. The same frame he used to see at three and hazy, at seven and doubtful, at thirteen and angry. Now he sees it in the mirror and it’s still as alien as the faint crow’s feet around her eyes, the way his stubble rubs up against his palm at four in the afternoon when he forgets the ink on his fingers and ends up with stained palms and lips.

 

Somewhere in the distance there is a faint ring and both of them start into motion: her, briskly effective and him, nonsensically languid.

“That’s your—“ “I gotta—“ they start and then fall silent in a common habit of allowing the other to speak first. Another one of those changes that snuck up on them over the years, creeping into their hearts and their mouths. Something old, something new.

 

As always, she regains her composure with a curt nod.

“You should leave now. Otherwise you’ll have to face the crowds at the luggage check-in.”

And it’s ludicrous, he wanted to go. Argued with her a whole night and a whole day until she finally acquiesced, folded her hands and told him _if it will make you happy_. He wanted to go and he wants to go, but still, in this moment, he would prefer to go back to her home with her, lay on the couch and sleep until this whole endeavour has become as hazy as indifferent as a dream in the night. Hear her and her girlfriend’s quiet breathing from the master bedroom, their hushed whispers and laughs in the morning, the sound of skin on skin. But he doesn’t, the only response the clench of his fingers around the retractable handle of his suitcase.

 

She doesn’t say _I hope this will be everything you’re looking for_ and he doesn’t say _I hope you’re right_ but in the way her brow crinkles, then absurdly, suddenly smoothes over he still recognizes her sudden shift in mood, a tacit agreement. When she steps forward, he expects an embrace, but even after all these years, she still manages to surprise him right through to the center.

The kiss of her dry lips against his temple is as light as a feather, as much of a blessing as she can give him.

 

When she leaves, her heels beat a staccato on linoleum. She walks with the air of purpose surrounding her solitary form, people moving out of her way as naturally as Moses raising his hand to crush the Egyptians under the divided seas in Exodus. And he can’t help thinking she is more beautiful than he has ever seen her, even in the stark, austere light of an unforgiving two hundred watt. From the side, he can see a single businessman turn around and gaze after her retreating figure, the smartphone still clutched to his ear forgotten.

The handle of the suitcase suddenly feels hot in his own hands.

He turns to leave.

 

 

 

IT turns out he still has some time to beat before he’s even supposed to get to the boarding area. The queue at the luggage drop is as long as can be, multiple flights being handled from the same ten or so counters, but once a large (proportionally as well as numerically) family from the deepest recesses of Idaho has been processed, it moves more quickly than he expected. He barely has time to check his phone or catch up on any of the news shown on the slightly pale LED screen over the check-in counters before he is motioned to the next free counter by a security man in a navy blue uniform and a jauntily dislodged cap. He thinks about telling him it’s about to slide off, but catches himself in the motion of opening his mouth, giving the woman at the counter an open-mouthed smile. She answers in turn, even if the shadows under her eyes are deeper than the maw of the luggage conveyor belt. The cheap polyester blouse in blue and yellow looks like it must itch and the colours are much too bright for this grey hour of the morning .

But he supposes she thinks much the same of him, with his garish red joggers and burgundy sweatshirt. He must look like a walking advertisement for Nike or a very rich Russian tourist but if his American passport strikes a dissonance within her, she doesn’t move a single muscle to show it.

 

His luggage is surprisingly small enough to still fit into cabin even if he brought the larger suitcase. Not a lot of people on this flight, she tells him with the air of someone thinking of her next cigarette break, not at six in the morning and not headed to Europe. Offers to upgrade him to first class in regard of his PremierPlatinum status on his miles, but he reluctantly declines nevertheless, tells her to upgrade the next person after him for free on his MileagePlus account. The look in her eyes tells him she has experienced this sort of misplaced generosity before, but her smile still deepens, becomes more genuine as her eyes unhood the slightest bit.

He won’t deny the slight tinge of regret once he notices the amount of small children behind him, most of them running around or being held back, bounced, soothed by harried parents with the same gold stamp on their passport: lion, crown, axe.

Perhaps the stay in economy will ground him more thoroughly than the complementary drinks and attractive stewardesses in first class. The irony of it being an international flight is not lost on him and were he to have a notebook, he’d assuredly write it down in the same chickenscratch handwriting he only knows one other person to have.

He’d have preferred first class, naturally. But this is not that kind of journey.

 

He’s given his passport back together with the familiar green-edged sticker on his boarding card and wonders whether in another life, she’d recognize the name. Recognize him too, from the way his hair sticks up in all the wrong directions, uncoiffed and barely combed before he had choked down the last sip of his tea and hastened into Rose’s waiting car, the passenger seat’s door already open. The high, hawkish arch of his brows over his eyes sunken in their cavities. To the Ray-Ban he exchanges every year for the newest model.

 _Suum cuique_ , he thinks in honour of his old alma mater and turns away from the counter. The Spartan pleasures they allow themselves. He, his clothing. Rose, her surprisingly hardy collection of orchids blooming each- and everywhere on the surfaces of her brightly lit apartment. A waterfall of colours, from the purest, powdery white to the deepest, black-tinged purple ( _parasites,_ she had proclaimed with a wrinkle of distaste and a tone of wry fondness, _only growing if you ignore them_ ). Jade, her technology. John, well.

 

There’s still at least half an hour left before he has any need to get to the departure area and gate, but he still has to pass through the security checkpoint and even if the international flights on a Wednesday morning are as sparingly booked as he expected, the international terminal is still somehow crammed, the shove and cram of tourists, white-collar suits and families enough to turn him off exploring the nooks and crannies of a terminal he rarely ever visits. Occasionally, when Jade still used to work at the conservatory in Australia, he caught a layover from here to Toronto, stand in front of the bronze bust of Tom Bradley. Ask himself, with the fresh wonder of someone rediscovering the world they had left behind, _who the fuck is this asshole_?

But he hasn’t been here in years, not since the Virgin Australia flights were laid over to Terminal 2. Not since Jade left Sydney in favour of Houston, Houston in favour of nowhere, nowhere in favour of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

But he still knows his way around those cheap, squeaking floors on muscle memory alone, toeing his way around strollers and luggage carts. Everyone looks grey and drawn under those neon beams, but he reassures himself that this is not the potassium benzoate in the water, hyperglycaemia clumping crystals in their blood, but just the lighting. There is no Faygo running from the taps. There is no megalomaniac slowly poisoning their water supplies. There never was, not here. Not ever here.

 

Security is a comforting routine, even if the well-meant all-clear the employee at the counter had given for his luggage to be upgraded up to cabin, means he’s stopped and has to open his suitcase. He’s forgotten all about the water bottle buried deep in the recesses of his luggage and is reluctant to part with it even when the security guard shifts from one leg to another distrustfully, his hand over the bulge in his jacket. It’s probably only a taser and he’s withstood much, much worse. Clipping his sunglasses to the collar of his shirt and belatedly dropping them into the plastic tray he’s already deposited his jacket and keys in is nothing against it. But the idea of going down in front of the Idahoan family who have miraculously found their way behind him in the queue, three children and a round-cheeked, drooling baby eyeing him with barefaced in curiosity, unceremoniously twitching from the voltage like a gutted on the dirty floor isn’t all that appealing to him despite his apprehensions.

It’s not like he has much choice except refusing his flight. He sees the bottle vanish into the bottom of a black trash bag and thinks about chlorine tap water from a faucet that would surely fail the WHO’s international health regulations for airport, thinks about a six dollar bottle of spring water at the nearest Marché.

 

In the end, he buys the latter from a young cashier whom the mysterious difference between carbonated and natural apparently eludes, and refuses to let his mood slide down the vicious scale of an oncoming foul mood. He’s not thirteen anymore, there is no reason to throw a tantrum over spilled milk. Or in his case, wasted water. The boy handing him the receipt is pale and mousy, the residual dark tint of acne scars still covering his chin and cheeks and if Dave had any sympathy for youth left, he’d smile at him and leave a tip. As such, he puts a fiver down with the air of someone who would rather slam it onto the counter, crumples his receipt into his pocket where it will inevitably get reduced to sticky, white clumps all over the front of his trousers when he forgets to check his pockets come next laundry. Gives an unintelligible, drawn-out murmur at the confused thanks the young man offers and turns to leave, bottle in one hand, tugging his suitcase after himself in the other.

Once he’s situated himself on a bench in front of one of those man-wide LED panels announcing boarding status and gating location, he twists the bottle cap open one-handedly and takes a sip without looking.

Carbonated.

Motherfucker.

 

Only after the objectively charming mother-daughter pair on the bench next to him has left does he allow himself the most glorious of eye rolls. It visibly unsettles a pair of teenagers hunched under the screen, whispering to each other with the disdain for everyone over the age of twenty-five puberty brings to light as they size him up. He returns their gaze for a moment, as level as he can allow himself without snorting in amusement, then returns his attention to the screen. Still some time left, enough for him to extract his phone from the crevices of his coat’s pocket, thumbing the leather flipcase open and eyeing the screen speculatively. It’s, as always, dirty. After the shades he never really got the hang of using smartphones again and once they broke, he had no chance of replicating them. Even Google Glasses doesn’t make up for the missing presence of the Alchemiter. Jade once told him with a hushed voice that always indicated something she thought of as a confession that even though she missed the endless scientific possibilities it opened up, not to mention the impressive armoury she had then created, that was not really the source of her ire. What irritated her most of all about the SBURB Client’s devices not carrying over into the new/old world was the lack of infinitely synthesizable clothing.

“No more cluttering up your wardrobe,” she had justified herself, smile tinged with a hint of embarrassment at the thought of appearing shallow. Her hair had billowed in the breeze, fanned out like a crow’s coat and he had loved her then.

Loved her, still loves her with a fierce sort of desperation. Grains of sand on tan skin, the limbal ring between green and white in her eyes, the quiet wheeze of her breath in the night. She had not asked when he had told her where he was going, just as he had not asked when she had quietly packed her things one day and left, the key on his kitchen table and the postcards from Tehran, Casablanca, Addis Ababa a growing pile in the drawer of his nightstand.

 

Only had wished him success in finding whatever it was he hoped to achieve through this, her smile clear even though the 520ppi grainy blur of their Skype call. Only now does he realize the twist of her hair around her finger was nervous, not distracted, the way she had hesitated before saying _whatever_ instead of _whoever_.

He knows they are all worried about the outcome of his trip in their own way, even if they have all done their very best not to say outright that it might just be a waste of time. Rose called him an _enfant perdu_ with a tight smile that had only loosened by a bolt or two when, pronouncing _enfant terrible_ with an over-the-top Southern accent just to see the corners of her mouth lift genuinely, he had protested. John has been… John. Supremely comforting and not at all helpful at the same time.

 

In a last-ditch attempt to see a little clearer, he rubs the phone on the fabric of his shirt but only succeeds in smearing the sebum marks his fingers have left on the screen. After that he quickly aborts the attempt for all the three looks it garners him and keys the phone open. Four unread messages and two unopened emails await him. One, he knows, is an email from his editor reminding him about the deadline at the end of the month, three days from now. The other is, surprisingly or perhaps not much so, from Jade, wishing him a safe flight and linking to a Wikipedia page of some place apparently worth visiting. He marks both of them as read, after a moment of hesitation deletes the one from his editor. Not one of the four pieces he is required to send in is even remotely done, but it’s a ten-hour flight from LAX to London and if this turns out to be a completely fruitless endeavour, he can always just get a hotel and hole himself up with room service and the Wacom tucked away next to his laptop.

 

The messages, however, are a wholly different story.

 

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] \--

TT: Do let me know when you’ve landed and taking off, respectively. It would be a shame if I had to alert the Beredskapstroppen if you inexplicably went AWOL.

\--  tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] \--

 

There is really nothing he can respond to that. Well, there are a variety of numerous and increasingly crude things he could respond, but for now he wagers his bets and opens the other unread messages. It is, wholly to be expected, from John.

\-- ghostyTrickster [GT] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] \--

GT: man, i swear we’re literally the only ones still using this stupid app.  
GT: i don’t know why we just don’t switch to messenger or whatsapp, at this point we must be singlehandedly funding the dev’s hosting costs!  
GT: but dude, are you on your way yet?  


\-- ghostyTrickster [GT] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] \--

 

When the events of what he has taken to only vaguely referencing as _The End_ had transpired, you had found that on your newly restored computer and phone had been nothing other than the Pesterchum client, freshly minted in all its buggy 6.0v glory. And he hadn’t been the only one. His chumroll had been modified, fourteen names etched out in the unforgiving grey of unavailability. Contacting them, or rather trying to, had given all of you the same error message you won’t bother to recall.

After that, John had changed his handle back to his old one.

He hadn’t explained, but he thought he understood nevertheless. Rose deleted them and he has the faint suspicion a few of the others did too, but he never could bring himself to erase their names. It’s superstitious to the point of bordering on paranoia, but if he is the last one who still actively seeks them out, what is going to happen when he deletes the last evidence of their past?

If no one remembers them, have they even existed at any point in time and space?

He is well and uncomfortably aware he’s on a dangerous tightrope between the idea of object permanence and the sort of pseudo-philosophical "If a tree falls in a forest” thought experiment that he discussed over spliffs and beer in college. It’s a slippery slope and he has little to no interest in going down that particular mudslide and soiling his proverbial clothing yet again. Stuffing mud down your throat loses its appeal after a few times of washing branches out of your hair.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG]  began pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] \--

TG: christ in a sidecar have you no heart  
TG: im gonna hit you with what bill clinton used in one of his better speeches which im not going to label with the adjective “good” but instead with a hesitant “rhetorically convincing” because it really brought the cliché pervading the early nineties and noughties to life  
TG: but  
TG: think of the children john  
TG: think of the children  
TG: that poor unnamed swampass with two blind eyes and a generous margin for bugs not to mention a surprising intelligible way of describing error messages with a string of numbers you have to look up on a website that looks like its on the first slide of a presentation called  
TG: “how not to design your darkweb website on tor”  
TG: probably has like a gaggle of starving children and the only way to feed them is with the bread crumbs exchanged from our meagre exchanges between you me and that snarky broad on the right  
TG: jade uses skype more these days in any way its like she doesnt even recall the wonderful times weve had constantly crashing the server by sending pictures more than a single hundred kilobytes big  
GT: yeah, i guess you’re right.  
GT: man, i remember when it was version 4.1 or something and even opening links from the client would bust it down completely.  
GT: rose sent me her gamefaqs profile once and i spent thirty minutes trying to get it from glitching out whenever i opened the convo!  
GT: good times.  
TG: good times in-fucking-deed  
TG: that deed is so good its operative clauses alone have a sick fire of interest coming on from the vendor  
TG: not to mention those absolutely off the hook habendums you aint ever seen any of those before in a regular ole deed of conveyance  
TG: before proclaiming a covenant that habendum just kicked off a radical triple lutz off the rink and landed in such a sick layback spin plus catchfoot inclusive it to the utter surprise of everyone watching a piece of paper fucking figure skate  
TG: it turned into a redendum  
TG: now i know what youre asking is this harry potter or WHAT  
TG: but fear not your resident wizard or in this case wizardress (because i still reserve the use witch for using it in front of children when really i mean the b-word) will in its course explain it to you  
TG: should i relay you over to rose  
GT: oh jeez.  
GT: i think i’m good! you haven’t been on a roll like this ever since we had that argument over jane’s versus dad’s cake batter.  
TG: look im just saying  
TG: obviously white cake is the superior choice here get the fuck outta town with your cheap ass crumbly victoria sponge  
GT: i mean, you’re wrong in all the ways here.  
GT: but you’re trying to get me off your case again, aren’t you?  
TG: damn it  
TG: why do all of my friends have to be hyperaware old people in the bodies of millenials  
GT: haha! flattery will get you nowhere, dave. i mean, it will get you _somewhere_ , but not in this convo.  
GT: you know i’m not gonna try to dissuade you from anything or say it’s a bad idea and all. but no one would blame you if you didn’t decide to go through with it.  
TG: i know i know and in some weird convoluted way i do actually appreciate yall looking out for me  
TG: even if it speaks volumes about my character that youre all stepping around me like im some prime raw egg carried when an earthquake a good solid six on the richter magnitude scale breaks out in my immediate vicinity  
TG: maybe even a seven i dont know i aint an earthquakeologist or whatever seismic scale ology those people call themselves  
TG: but i feel like  
TG: im maybe perhaps the only one aside maybe from rox who can actually do this you dig  
TG: just hypothetically if were regarding the amount of people who were actually there when everything went down and we went from groove to groove like a bumpy ride on the miami highway  
TG: which is basically just us seven  
TG: and then subtract the amount of people who aint actually that close in regards to personal relationships and past entanglements then what the circle becomes rapidly smaller on a fibonacci style spiral  
TG: so essentially its just me or those three  
GT: yeah. we never really had that type of bond from the start, even though we got to be pretty close later on!  
TG: the best type of bond and absolutely no beef im not doubting your bro carapacities or either roses or janes willingness to assist the matter but im unsure whether thats what would really help in this situation  
TG: sometimes you just need a metaphorical or even physical kick swiftly delivered per airplane from what im thinking is the busiest fucking departure terminal ever created in this whole fucking universe  
TG: (seriously im surrounded by at least three babies right now and one woman who seems to be in the process of delivering a fourth)  
TG: and sometimes you need that someone to well  
TG: be me  
GT: i can’t believe you still say carapacities. that’s so lame, dude.   
TG: excuse you  
GT: but, yeah. i believe you.  
GT: but if this ends up to be totally horrible, i’m getting down there myself to zillyhoo some ass!  
GT: that sounds wrong, but you know what i mean.  
TG: and you rib me for still using some of the old slang dude i know you still use cata(ptcha)gorically from time to time  
TG: i feel like pot and kettle doesnt even cut it anymore were in prime homonym territory here  
TG: in any way i know you got my back and all that slightly offkey jazz a bad louis armstrong impersonator would bring at a wedding at three in the morning to scare off the last guests because damn does he want to go home finally  
TG: and you know i appreciate it  
TG: but i think this is going to be a good thing for me too  
TG: some kind of closure to top off those weird lightning rounds weve been engaging in with in all of our one-on-one-in-eight conversations  
TG: which as hal recently informed me are 28 ways of open-channel talk we all have here  
TG: but  
TG: i think i need this too  
GT: well, then just take care, dude. come back in one piece.  
GT: and message one of us to make sure you’ve not vanished in the depths of the sognefjorden!  
TG: man what is it with yall and incorrectly guessing words for my localities im pretty sure youd be embarrassing some natives were they ever to get a glimpse of this highly non-ssl chatlog  
TG: in any way i think my gate has just been called gotta bounce  
TG: talk to you all once i aint surrounded by a literal cloud of oestrogen  


\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] \--

 

The belief in Murphy’s law has been prevalent for so long that even through everyone’s mutual disdain for it in the face of what happened before _The End_ (unanimously, which really means just by him, dubbed _The Hapenings_ ), it’s still widely believed in. As such, the fact that the gate is at the other end of the terminal could be cited as an instance of that. These days, they don’t believe in much, not even in death.

He makes it with five minutes to spare, even at the cost of an unattractively flushed face and a near trip-up right in front of the stewardess collecting their boarding cards and checking passports against faces and names. Even from his own perspective, he’s aware it must look an ugly picture, red face against hair half-sticking up from the unruly cowlick it forms whenever he doesn’t sweep it to the side and half-pressed into the side of his head from where he’d slept on it last night. Without the eversheer of metahumanity they’re all pretty regular John and Jane Does and though he’s not vain enough to wish it back, he does miss the regular comforts it offered. Namely, not look like a fool in front of the pretty stewardess.

 

But luck in the form of an eight-sided dice does seem to shadow his footsteps today and nobody comments on his dishevelled appearance, nor on the fact he’s wearing sunglasses at six in the morning. Usually, his excuse is some variant of light-sensitivity when he’s in a good mood or a cruelly disfiguring retinal injury when he’s in an even better mood, but airline personal seems to be trained to handle eccentric guests who refuse to fly First Class and instead upgrade to the first row, window seat in Economy. They handle him with exceptional care ( _do I look this raw a fucking egg?_ he murmurs to himself; a very stout British man seems as if he overhears and looks for all the world as if he might just except Dave’s minder to appear and start cajoling him into his chair) and by the time he’s strapped into his seat, the idyllic contrast of touristic capitalism against nature on Venice Beach and Playa Del Rey a faraway buzz behind the confines of the airplaine, he is almost content. It helps that none of the approximately twenty babies in the 787 Dreamliner are anywhere in his near distance, though he can hear a soft croon and a less soft wail some good thirty rows behind him. It chills him to a degree he does not go further into than surface-level, wading in it like he would in a kiddie pool before metaphorically getting the fuck out of dodge. Physically, he resigns to plugging his headphones in, blissfully and wholly ignorant of the look the stewardess is shooting him, now much less graceful in the wake of his blatant disregard for the song-and-dance routine she is instigating before take-off.

 

Once the airstrip rolls away under them, green and brown fading into blue and grey and that one, swooping, stomach-turning moment of no gravity has passed, he settles back into his chair. Ever since airplanes became a regular thing they had to rely on again, they’ve been chasing that moment.

From the first time all six of them had been strapped into one of Virgin Australia’s finest, as excited about seeing the Pacific Island in this world as they had been in the last, he had seen their expressions.

Muted grief and adrenaline, pupils dilated but mouths tight. None of them except Jade and he had flown any more than strictly necessary after it.

It’s not one of the things they bring up in regular conversation, at least none he’s been privy of. To date, most of their conversations consist of blurry Snapchat pictures, forwards of videos and logistical questions regarding their whereabouts and schedules. It’s perhaps the most adult they have ever been and it should be some level of exhilarating, but in the face of his current endeavour it’s a little hard to believe they’ve grown up past thirteen at all.

 

He sees adulthood in the straight line of Rose’s shoulders in her office chair, the sloped curve of Jade’s back over her microscope, the broad expanse of John’s back. When he looks into the mirror, he sees the soft lines of the boy behind the square jaw of the man. A hybrid, half child and half dotard. Three steps behind the adults, half a mile ahead of the rest of the population. His reflection in the window of the airplane seems to sneer at him, distorted by the fish-eye glass, thick as his thumb and smeared from countless sticky little fingers.

 

Once they’re in the air, the rolling in his stomach settles down enough for him to down two Alprazolam and settle back in his seat. They will be starting the first in-flight movie soon enough and he doesn’t plan on being awake for the second. Experience has taught him that if the first is either a musicals or more than thirty years old, the second will be some eurotrash B-reel from the backrow of the film rolls, something along the line of _We’re The Millers_ or _Paul Blart: Mall Cop_.

He falls asleep to the crackling static of _As Time Goes By_ played on a 1927 Kohler  & Campbell piano, hazily piecing together old memores together in the clouded fugue state between two sleep stages. John eating cornflakes in bed; breakfast and breakfast television and the red banners of news scrolling across the lower screen from between plain white sheets. Three million for the piano. _Do you think he’s fine_ , and John reaching out blindly, fumbling to change the channel, the heavy weight of his hand in Dave’s hair.

_Do you think she’s fine? Do you think he’s happy?_

He sleeps.

 

To his dismay, the scales between balancing out the satisfaction of their customers and their need to satisfy an audience who probably has one to three minors peeking over Mommy’s or Daddy’s shoulder, he wakes up during _Catwoman_ and instantly regrets it. Halle Berry in latex is always a bonus but the dialogue is bad even for someone whose business consists mostly of both ends of the talent spectrum: low-PQI JPEGs submitted to magazines that either cater to an audience too young to understand his jokes or too stoned to refuse them, slightly better ones to serious editorials. Photographs too, when he gets the occasional hire to accompany a journalist. It mostly just pans out as taking pictures of State’s Largest Carrot (inevitably hefted by a jolly, steel-handed and overalled man in his seventies who hefts the thirty-pounder of his shoulder like a picador would heft his spear) and the usual celebrity shoot. Those he mostly declines, even if he can’t afford to, because if everything Rose has envisioned had really come true back then in the future, he knows more about being stalked by the press than he does about the stalking.

An unforeseen upside is that through his free time on weekends and the days he hands his commissions in early, he reads the streets of Los Angeles like a map, the restaurant Rose likes to eat in with its gauzy hangings and linen tablecloths, the nooks and crannies around Solstice Canyon no tourist ever crosses into, the backroom of Arcana, quiet solitude between mountains and mountains of books. Its balance act between urban professionalism and the a poverty percentage fluctuating between fifteen and twenty percent. It has never been his place to judge. They are tacit observers, aging gods in the middle of American suburbia. They do not judge. They do not pray.

 

 

 

SOMEWHERE between the last third and the end of Catwoman, he dozes off over his open sketchbook again, jerking in and out of sleep with the terrible sense of familiarity, of sleeping through his alarm clock, a phantom beeping ringing through his skull. Perhaps it’s the impending doom of the deadlines looming over his head like a Damocles’ sword that hinder his sleep. Thirty rows behind him, a baby starts crying again, uncomprehendingly and exhausted. Someone groans. It smells like recycled air and drying clothes.

The plane collectively exhales in relief once the familiar, grainy green seatbelt sign comes on, the cabin attendants reminding them to put their tray tables up and store each and every luggage under their seats. London spreads out under them, a map of grey and green splotches interspaced with the slow, lazy flow of the Thames. The river bifurcates the city in two uneven halves, bridges every now and then crossing what seems to be an endless vast chasm. He thinks for a second about the technical difficulties of building a bridge over a river, thinks about the way they used to build up monuments in a sleight of hand, tear them down in the blink of an eye. His Statues of Liberty, his Liberties. Gone, all gone.

 

Now instead there are stone bridges and carefully, excruciatingly drawn up city concepts to ensure maximal usage in minimal space. Humanity has become so entrepreneurial, or perhaps they had become so wasteful.

 

There is a fine line between remembrance and mania and he prides himself on toeing that line so successfully that he does not see the towers of Derse in the faint image of Westminster, the spires and gargoyles he can only see in his imagination.

 

London is dark, surprisingly warm and pretty stuffy from what he glimpses of it in the rushed twenty minutes he spends hurrying to his layover gate. He’s pretty sure he forgets his shades and almost turns around to hasten back to the plane, but the motion unsettles them from where they are lodged on the top of his head and he fumbles to catch them. His phone is still on LA time, but it has to be midnight or so in London and even later at his destination. It’s part of why he doesn’t mind the delay at the check-in counter so much, something about the baggage transfer system messing up and them needing to manually fix it. It gives him some time to delve into the duty-free shops.

 

As much as he prefers to keep his nebulous hate-love relationship with capitalism and all its accompaniments on the down-low, he’s never actually spent too much time in those shops. They all sell the same things for the same prizes. Each airport gift shop around the world is utterly exchangeable. The same Toblerone bars and wall of whiskey, oversized M&Ms and teddy bears. The same people working there too, dressing in grey and white and light blue, women in badly applied make-up and men with overly coiffed gelled hair. It’s too late for them to even come ask what he needs, one employee busy with hunching over at the cash register, the other throwing the occasional look or two into the perfume corner’s direction to make sure no-one pockets the newest Gucci or Marc Jacobs. There is a permanent sale on Davidoff’s _Cool Water_ , just like he had seen in the duty free shop at LAX and for a moment, he experiences a strange moment of discorporeal surrealism when he sees an orange 70% Off sticker crumpled just so. Not quite Déjà vu, but the split-second paranoia of objects carrying over with him. It wouldn’t have been possible someone _took_ those perfume bottles--?

Only when his phone buzzes in his pocket does he jerk away from the sales table he’s been fixed on for an indeterminate amount of time. To his relief, the time is still the same, almost half an hour after they should have boarded. The signs on the wall still say LGW. He has not lost any time.

 

After that he doesn’t quite want to bide his time in the gift shop any more than he has to, but he’s been in there for so long, he is compelled to at least buy something to avoid the illusion that he is some kind of extremely stealthy slow-motion shoplifter. He’s in that trap now and there’s no way of wrestling his way out. And perhaps crashing on someone’s doorstep without anything to appease any misgivings is an ill-taken venture. At least something little, something that symbolizes _I’m sorry for invading your privacy, but not sorry enough to not go through with it_. Chocolate is so generic and as much as he would revel in buying cheap Cadbury’s for six dollars when he could get it at the corner stone for less than one, just to see the faces of his friends inevitably screw up in honest, nostalgic enjoyment, he’s also not too sure whether it’s actually the right thing to bring him. He wishes Jane was with him. This would all be infinitely simplified if he had someone who actually was proficient in tastes and presents, specifically for his purpose. Booze seems somewhat tasteless too, as if implying they needed it to stand each other’s company.

There is absolutely no way he constantly second-guessed himself like that when he was younger. It’s a ridiculous, outlandish question to pose to himself when he’s barely scratching at the lower end of thirty, but there was something exhilarating about brashness and youth back then, the knowledge of quite literally being on top of the world. All these years they’ve served and reigned and ruled and it comes down to all of them in different corners of the earth. Dave questioning his sanity in front of a garish display of Halloween candy.

 

In the end he grabs a little teddy bear with a candy bar taped to its plush paws and walks up to the counter. The man who rings him up is too tired to question his purchase, but only after he’s credited the $14.99 to his VISA does he actually inspect the bear in its thankfully nondescript non-transparent bag. It’s not too shabby, actually. The fur is soft and not too polyester-itchy with the clear implication of instant inflammability when he presses a finger to its ear. Of course, the bright yellow _Wish You Were Here!_ embroidered on his chest he could do without, but now that he’s bought it, he doesn’t have the time to turn around on his heel and exchange it for something less gruesome.

But perhaps the irony behind it will be appreciated.

 

The flight boards an hour later than expected, but he is not too concerned about that. They will arrive at his destination at four in the morning local time regardless and he still has to get to the rental car and actually _drive_. He’s not looking forward to that part, but his GPS is decidedly functional and doesn’t speak in tongues any more than necessary.

The plane is empty despite its size. It’s still an international flight, but the time is odd enough to deter more than the occasional suit hectically typing out emails before they have to turn off their phone for take-off and a couple of sun-burnt tourists trying to save money by taking a flight in the middle of the night. It also means he can spread his shit out along the seats, sliding the armrests up once the seatbelt sign has turned off and dropping his bag alongside the unfortunate teddy bear on the middle seat. From his angle at the window he can almost pretend the bear is squinting at him like his consorts used to, tiny eyes over too many teeth and a healthy sense of disbelief in all his nonsensical antics.

Rose’s words about coping mechanisms and too many mementos are still a vague echo in the back of his head and he tugs the plastic bag over the teddy bear’s head. Feels vaguely ridiculous a second later. What did he think was going to happen? That by some miraculous transuniversal miracle the bear would open its felt mouth and give him some life-changing advice about as helpful as their early sprite tiers? If anything, that thing would probably shrug in a copyrighted parody of that Mark Wahlberg film and tell him _can’t help you, bro, you’re on your own_.

Thanks. Exactly what he needed. Getting shot down by an imaginary version of a teddy bear at his age.

 

It’s best to probably not dwell on this particular chapter. The sea is still dark under him, a silent bottomless maw only illuminated by the plane’s lights, silver seaform cresting on its waves. Back then there used to be things in the sea too, white and long-finned, sharp teeth and almost human eyes.

 _Enough_. This is not what he set out to do. There is another unread message on his phone and a few crumpled papers he printed out once it was final that he was going to go through with it. He checks the message first. With his luck, it’s just John ragging on him for getting the hell outta dodge too quickly or any of the others wishing him a safe flight.

Instead, it’s a combination of both.

 

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] \--

TT: Jake called me just after I got home. He mentioned you weren’t answering your phone, most likely due to your travel.

TT: I think he’d like you to message him. For all his cheeriness in the world, he did sound a little… dare I say, anxious.

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] --

 

Jesus.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering golgothasTerror [GT] \--

TG: hows it going lil j  
TG: hanging in there are we  
TG: a little birdie tweeted to me in less than 140 signs that you were in need of some prime spiced brospacito talk  
TG: hit me up in in the middle of whatever ocean lies between the united kingdom and the rest of middle to eastern Europe i aint going anywhere any time soon  
GT: Sakes alive you really didnt crimp any time now did you.  
GT: I tried to call rose and she told me she had already dropped you off at the airport.  
TG: thats pretty much exactly what she relayed to me either so i think youre gonna have to be a bit more specific than that  
TG: if youre to warn me about going through with this let it be known i have been under tough scrutiny at no less than three occasions by none other than john himself  
TG: so yes  
TG: im pretty damn sure about this  
GT: That wasnt at all what i was going to say!  
TG: was it not  
TG: sorry about that then do continue my good dude  
GT: I honestly think its a splendid idea! If anyone can put the situation on the spot and devolve all of those mysterious circumstances surrounding the situation weve on our hands here i am absolutely sure you are the best man for it.  
GT: Lift the veil of unresolved and inexplicable shrouded silence so to say.  
TG: my god youre actually getting dangerously into waxing purple prose here  
TG: have you been reading proust again  
GT: Mens sana in corpore sano my dear boy!  
GT: But im afraid i have been derailing my caboose straight off the tracks. John always said you had an awful affinity for that trait.  
TG: guilty as charged your honour  
TG: my defense rests  
TG: its not hard considering it at the moment literally consists out of a teddy bear im trying to suffocate in a duty free bag  
GT: Im not even going to try and get into that one for both of our sakes.  
GT: The patented strider machination is something i would in any other place cherish to high heavens but i fear time is a little bit awasting.  
GT: But gosh darn it i would really prefer i wasnt still in the middle of bumrushery nowhere. I feel my medium of support i can offer is reduced to a rather somber average here!  
GT: I guess what im trying to say here is that i wish i could have come with you.  
TG: aw shit jake  
TG: and trust me if i didnt get into this whole shtick rump over shades you woulda been the first person i woulda asked  
TG: well you and rox perhaps but im sure you can live with that  
GT: Far be it from me to denounce roxys status. Christ knows shes always been a steady pillar of support for all of us! If not for her i dont know how any of us would have gotten those first few.  
GT: _Well_. We need not go down alley further i suppose.  
TG: closed for inspection as you wish  
TG: that alley is full of cheap hookers with sagging tits and black lungs and the health police has finally decided to shut it down for a thorough renovation  
TG: maybe a juice shop will open its doors once weve finally all decided to let sleeping dogs lie or rehash this thing over and finally close that particular chapter of our life  
TG: or rather lives  
GT: Hehe! Well youre definitely right about the hookers.  
GT: Jane sends her regards too from when ive called her this morning. Well I suppose it was morning for her you know how i dont really have your timezones ready in my head.  
GT: In any way she will definitely try to get in contact once youre actually in… what was the towns name again?  
TG: heim  
GT: Yes heim! Exactly.  
GT: She was of the opinion that too many of us many actually would rather than help in fact put the thumbscrews on you if were getting all up in your so called biznasty.  
TG: you and your outdated torture euphemisms youve been spending too much time touring those medieval museums watching mannequins get speared to death through the ass  
GT: I have to shamefully confess you busted me there bro.  
TG: but bless janey and her preternatural sense for whatever we need in that moment i swear some of those witch powers mustve carried over  
GT: She also told me to relay that you best hand your work in before your deadline or shes not baking you a cake for your birthday.  
TG: i take everything back shes my least favourite of all yall lunatics  
GT: But over the course of this conversation maybe i had something of a presque vu realization as rose would call it.  
GT: In retrospect maybe my whole insistence on coming with you was a little born out of a wish to be actually the one who could make sense of this situation you know?  
GT: We all are aware im not very good about sitting on my hands and just watching from the sidelines.  
GT: But i honestly believe youre the only one who can make heads or tails of this.  
GT: So were all really trying to refrain from putting the proverbial heat in you because this situation is already busted up enough to add our secondhand meddling.  
TG: why do i feel like theres a but at the end of that sentence  
GT: But!  
GT: Gosh darn it dave.  
TG: sorry man  
TG: continue im silently weeping in autoflagellative chasticement  
GT: I guess all im trying to say here is.  
GT: Be safe and do not try and play the hero here because lord knows weve done enough of that in our time.  
GT: Theres no shame in loss. Or grief for that matter.  
TG:  
TG: man  
TG: that one siege on lomax really did a number on you back then did it  
GT: It was an unavoidable lesson. Though id rather avoid it as a conversational topic.  
TG: ah shit sorry about that i shoulda known this is a particular banana peel that aint just laid out for conversational decoration  
GT: No harm done dave.  
GT: Just be safe.  
GT: After all where would i be if i didnt have all of you? Id have committed myself to a mental hospital by now without all my good friends to keep me safe and sane.  
TG: and aint that the truth  
TG: look im going to get in touch with one of you once i hit ground and make my way over im sure itll either be you or the hivemind will relay it to you  
TG: talk to you soon lil j  
GT: Take care buddy! When you come back well have to catch up on our lasertag score!!  
TG: oh ab so fucking lutely we will  
TG smell you later homes

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering golgothasTerror [GT] \--

 

The strange sensation of a relief he can never quite get used to is as always hard to swallow down, quenched under the familiar green-blue-purple-pink. Why he had been daunting this conversation eludes him. It’s just Jake. The same goofy good sport he’s known for what feels like a very, very long time. Probably has been.

In retrospect the whole spiel about worrying about all of their opinions is faintly ridiculous. The eight-seven-eight of them are so closely knit they might as well be made out of the same yarn. Their very own octahedron; eight faces, twelve edges, six vertices.

There is nothing perilous about Jake. There is nothing perilous about Dave.

 

Rose supplied him with a binder to store all the printscreens but it’s still nothing but a jumble of folded and crumbled pages: sixteen pages of GoogleMaps, the last three emails they received and their respective I.P. address Roxy sent him at three in the morning. A rental car confirmation in clumsy English. A picture, all of them printed with cheap laser toner colours that do neither of them justice, but at least if nothing turns up he can always just rove around from house to house and point at the face in the picture. A Wikipedia page filled with names he had to google in order to pronounce them correctly: Kristiansund, Öresund, Sør-Trøndelag. Kyrksæterøra. Heim.

He’s never been to Norway.

 

 

 

THE country seems charming enough when he’d entered it into Google, the usual idyll of green hills over endless, reflecting fjords, red-brick buildings with the kind of paintjob that looks like the white icing on a gingerbread house. Of course, it’s no guarantee that Sør-Trøndelag, that Heim will feature this sort of scenery as well. Even Detroit looks pretty on the first page of Google Pictures. Even Camden—well, Camden never does. But when he absently shuffles his papers, sorting the emails chronologically into the folder(January, February, June, nothing), even as the weight of his decision and its consequences begins to dawn on him at the same time a new day takes its course, somewhere in his brain, the part carefully sealed with the type of yellow crime scene tape he had never seen in real life until he had met the Mayor, he somewhat _is_ looking forward to this a little. Something old, something new.

It’s four in the morning, five thirty-six just swinging over into four thirty-seven when their pilot announces their descent onto Trondheim, first in what he assumes to be Norwegian, then in English. To his ignorant ear, it mostly consists of a lot of hard consonants and curiously pronounced vowels, but after decades of struggling to at least get a decent grip on the basics of Alternian, the language is not what daunts him.

 

Trondheim from above, at least what he can grasp from the streetlamps and buildings lighting up the infrastructure, looks like a kite on an exceptionally thick string. That or the head of a dog, but they don’t talk about dogs often. If so, it’s only ever about the curious aversion those tiny, shivering yappers with protruding eyes and rat-teeth seem to have against John. Walking next to him is proving to be a safety hazard in some parks of Los Angeles or Maple Valley. The only other thing that he deems truly distinguishable about Trondheim is that one of its districts is named Flatåsen. Just for posterity’s sake he jots it down, even on the risk of incensed Norwegian readers countering with the argument that most of the urban names in the States originally stem from ones in Europe. He’s pretty sure that there are at least twenty-five Berlins, no less than three located in Ohio. (Sometimes he thinks he is losing his edge, his bite, his soma.)

 

The city greets him in a sleepy, grey haze when they debark. It is around six in the morning now, still plents of time until the sun rises as each and every weather prognosis he consulted has assured him. He isn’t much looking forward to navigating a shift-stick car around the borders of the ocean in pitch-darkness, but now that he’s actually _here_ , his feet on Norwegian soil, lungs expelling the last, stale traces of the airplane and breathing in fresh air, Dave suddenly cannot wait. He’s closer to something he has not dared thinking about ever since those three emails and Roxy’s call at five in the morning. His chest feels as wide as the landscape he can see once he turns away from the chromed-over blue-panelled airport building, rocks and shrubbery and the black-on-grey shimmer of the ocean in the far distance, yet at the same time painfully, surprisingly tight. There are pine trees at the edge of the landing strip and their sweet, cloistering scent is carried over by the breeze. He inhales it with a niggling spark of curiosity, but to his disappointment the pine trees in Norway smell just like the ones at the edge of Cahungea Peak Loop. The air isn’t as fresh as he had hoped, but there is also a city of two hundred thousand Norwegians and non-Norwegians behind him. Perhaps it will clear up once he actually manages to get out of the city and onto what he optimistically deems the highway.

There is a bit of a holdup when he tries to leave. His American passport gets him extensively questioned, even if he more suspects it might be the early hours and the fact he is essentially dressed like a hobo with a taste for expensive loungewear. It’s his first contact with Norwegians and in a vaguely self-chasticing embarrassing way he feels a little like Doctor Livingston making contact with the natives. If natives were a good head taller and compared his living, breathing self to the cheap little passport snap about three times over. They ask him what his purpose is, where he is going, how long he intends to stay. Visiting is the easy answer, whom not so much. In a toss-up between friends and family he decides that both is also a valid answer. Tells them he’s not sure, a few weeks perhaps. Jokes about how he’s not sure how long it’ll take to get them all done, but neither of them blink an eye and suddenly it’s the early noughties in Texas and he’s just proven himself as unworthy of the finer arts of satire in front of an one-man audience.

They let him go eventually, with a hard-edged “Welcome to Norway”. Privately, he thinks an Arstozkan “Cause no trouble.” would have been more appropriate, but this is not dystopian any longer. Or not yet.

It turns out that even foreign rental car agencies are much more willing to bend the opening times if you semi-flash them with the kind of money that he has. Or well, Rose has, since he is too busy with fulfilling the starving artist stereotype that he has built up for himself in this life. If not for her, he would have either had to contact the others or hope for a minor miracle at the hands of one of the pecuniary gods. Which one of them would that even be, he muses absentmindedly as he takes pictures of the car: front, side, back immortalized on his timeline. Another thing to remind him of this if he chooses to return home without fulfilling his agenda. Probably pirate girl with the constant clang of bangles on her wrists and ankles when she walked, the slide of dirty copper in her pockets, the look in her eyes when they unearthed one of those old schooners.

The clerk pulls him out of his thoughts, the end of a sentence he wasn’t listening to raised in a question. Without asking him to repeat himself, he agrees in English that sounds painfully American against the clean-cut pronounciation of a foreign speaker. With a start he realizes he’s never looked up the tipping etiquette in Norway before leaving, he’s not sure whether sliding a crisp twenty into the guy’s breast pocket is expected of him or insulting. In the end, he takes the Toyota’s keys and sneaks the bill in between the pages of the contract he’s signed, absconding with no small amound of relief and a juvenile almost-giggle bubbling up behind his sternum.

 

Getting out of the car park proves to be the first obstacle. Driving a manual proves to be easier than he expected, steering it however does not. He spends ten agonizing minutes maneuvering himself out of his parking spot and around several cars he would probably classify as expensive if he bothered to know even the least thing about cars. When he finally manages to get onto the E39, his thermal shirt under his sweater is drenched in cold sweat and he’s balls-deep into some of his more creative curses. It’s still dark outside, but to his relief the street (he can’t bring himself to call it a highway after coming straight from Los Angeles and its I-405) is fairly lit, lightbulbs in high, convex streetlamps illuminating the road in front of him like fairy lights. The airport is on the outskirts of Trondheim and at this hour of the morning, only a few cars cross his path. They appear and vanish in his field of vision for a fleeting moment and then he is all alone again, surrounded on all sides darkness with the small, dimmed light overhead his only source of light. It should feel somewhat frightening; driving through perfect darkness in a country he neither speaks the language of nor knows how to call an ambulance in. But instead he feels almost safe in the quiet solitude, cocooned in black, velvety silence. It’s a little like submerging yourself in sopor and for one brief, aching moment he allows himself to miss Karkat.

 

The landscape changes the longer he drives, southern Trondheim suburbia with its flat white bungalows and shingled roofs slowly thinning out into patchy grass and the occasional bush or two. And then he takes a right and the ocean opens up on his right side, endlessly wide in the light that his headlights reflect onto it. It’s still so dark that he can only see a few miles, but the sky is slowly greying, a streak of blue shot through ashes and coal. On his left is what he assumes to be a massive forest, but the first row of trees swallows any light, absorbs it until only a hulking mass of branches and stems is visible.

He stops after a little more than an hour at a toll station to pay the obligatory car toll to a plump, brisk Norwegian woman. His intention is to drive straight on, to reach Heim before the sun comes up, but the ocean is so near and from a few hundred yards away he can see the red-and-orange neon sign above a small supermarket flicker into existence. Dusty and well-worn, it reminds him of the Chinese corner store Rose prefers to buy her bok choi and ginger from. Now that the cloying sense of urgency is gone and the distance to his goal has narrowed down impossibly, shrunken down to less than thirty miles, he is suddenly, embarrassingly hesitant to truck on.

Instead he parks the car in front of a wide sign proudly proclaiming this city to be Orkanger, population 8011. LA with its thirteen million, growing steadily, is suddenly very, very far away. In the supermarket, really just a grocery store, he encounters his first obstacle. The woman in there is old and repeatedly shakes his head when he offers her dollars, then euros, saying something in Norwegian, then trying in English. It is only when she opens her cash register with a sigh and holds out a few foreign bank notes that he understands and immediately feels like a douche afterwards. At the airport he did not encounter any difficulties with paying, but he did not consider the possibilities than some of the local shops might only take Norwegian currency. If not for Rose supplying him with a thick envelope filled with colourful bills, he would have to leave without buying anything.

He opens it, stares in barely veiled dismay at the selection. How much is a sweet and a bottle of water? Fifty kroner? Five hundred? Not for the first time comes the unbidden thought to mind that maybe, just maybe, he should have thought this more through. In the end, he just holds the envelope out to her and gestures with what he thinks is an appropriate amount of helplessness. In return, she looks at him with barely veiled exasperation, murmuring something in that high-pitched wheezy voice of hers that he is fairly sure translates to “foreign imbeciles” and takes a fifty out of the envelope. It leaves him with a chocolate bar, a bottle of water and an assortment of smaller coins, sleek silver and dirty golden veneer. He thanks her as sincerely as he can and leaves the shop, the sound of her croaky laughter accompanying his footsteps.

 

Only when he is sitting out on the marina, watching gulls circle the coastline, does he realizes he could have just googled the conversion rates. But the water is chilled and after three hours of nothing to drink, he is content with gulping it down in between bites of a crumbly, flaky chocolate bar that tastes a little bit like what you would get at a grandmother’s house because all she has left are old Cadbury Flakes gone a little white at the edges, but she wants to spoil you nevertheless. All the experiences he’s had are with either with Jane or with John’s grandma (same model, two versions) and none of them are in the habit of offering stale _anything_ , so he might just have to play it by ear here. Without anything further to distract his hands with, he lays the wrapper and empty bottle on the stone next to him. The moss overgrowing the Orkdalsfjorden’s border is wet from the night and he can feel it seeping into his trackpants when he clasps his knees, leans back to rest his head on the side of his car. There will be dust on the back of his sweatshirt and in his hair later, but it is a minor inconvenience. With all they’ve caused and been caused in one, two, twenty lifetimes, cleanliness is not a standard he might ever succeed to achieve.

For now, it is enough to sit here and think of nothing but the cries of the gulls over him, hungry and shrill in their savagery. For now it is enough.

 

The sun is beginning to ascend on his right side when he takes a right from the E39 and onto the Fv-680. Heim is located on the very outskirts, the vestiges of the mainland stretching its fingers out, separating into peninsulas and promontories before finally the first few splinters of bigger isles rise out of the water. The road tapers down until there are only two lanes, surrounded on both sides by trees four or five times his height. For almost half an hour he sees nothing but green and the occasional glimmer of silvery blue in between its leaves when he passes another lake. He parts from the ocean with a small amount of regret when the road bifurcates. Less than ten miles now and the houses are becoming more and more sparse, passing through villages consisting of clusters of houses, red and white, green and white, yellow and white. There is no such thing as fear, but his chest feels like an overblown helium balloon at the fair nevertheless. Against the steering wheel, his fingers leave clammy traces. Heim, 711 inhabitants at the last census. How hard can it be to find one person under seven hundred. Not harder than writing a symphony or laying down a track or. Or, or, or.

 

He knows that he is on the right path when the gulls in the air seem to multiply by increments, their cries angrier than ever.

 

In the end, he finds he does not have to search very far. The first person he encounters, a man in jeans and a feather down jacket washing his car, nose a little red from the frost but trucking on in disregard of the fact that the water from his hose must be the temperature of the third circle of hell, speaks English so well he feels a little ashamed of assuming everyone would possess the level of fluency the old woman at the store would. Around them a dog dances wildly, barking at Dave with unbridled happiness, his shaggy tail a steady blur.

“We don’t get visitors often,” the man apologizes after he orders the dog to sit in very decisive Norwegian. He’s pretty sure he only refrains from adding “Especially ones like you.” out of politeness. But when he shows him the photo of the eight of them, points with an ungloved finger that’s already pink from the cold, the man nods and Dave’s stomach somersaults with unwarranted viciousness.

“Yes, he lives here. Moved into the old Håkonssen house just up the road outside the village.” There is no curiosity in the man’s eyes, no questioning what a stranger might want with someone he has to ask others for to find. But he still finds himself explaining needlessly that they’re family, that they’re friends, that he needs to find him. All he gets is a brief, though not unfriendly nod in return before the man picks up his hose again and the dog jumps to his feet.

“The yellow house on the left if you follow the path straight up,” he says and Dave feels the clear, polite dismissal. He gets into his car with the clear sensation of the dog still watching him.

 

The road turns to a dirt path not long after he leaves Heim, the expanse of the Norwegian sea an uncommonly ugly dirt grey until the sun bathes it in white. Foam dances like lace on the burgeoning waves, leaving patterns of washed out, bubbling crosses. In the distance, a yellow house steadily looms taller.

 

The first thing he notices is the smoke coming out of the chimney, an honest-to-God white stream of ash and dust rising into the rapidly blueing sky and with some level of irrationality he is both relieved and dismayed. It means less time to convene with himself, but also less time he has to wait in the car and freeze his balls off.

Then, the house. It is nothing like Rose’s apartment in Los Angeles, Jane’s house in Golden Valley, Minnesota. The empty bachelor pad in Austin collecting dust bunnies and rusted copper.

It’s small and nondescript, a faded yellow paintjob the only way to distinguish that this is indeed the house the man was talking about. Just off to the side on a makeshift parking space is his brother’s truck. Only when he stops the car right next to it does he realize that this is not the Chevrolet he had sat in the passenger seat in, listening to Billy Holiday and talking about ska. It’s an old, dusty Honda and for some reason, this realization only furthers the tight vice around his chest, the balloon close to bursting. He shuts the car off. Sits inside for a minute before deciding he is not sixteen and terrified at the idea a reunion, not anymore. Opens the door and gets out before he can psyche himself out of it, can put the car in reverse and get a hotel in Kristiansund.

 

Dirk is standing on the porch.

His eyes are inscrutable.

 

 

 

THE first thing he notices, absurdly, is that he is not wearing his shades. There is no need to, it’s still so dark he’s having trouble navigating around both his car and the multitude of wet, muddy puddles spread out in front of the driveway. But back then on LOTAK, several miles above the krypton pooling around the bottom of temples and tombs, the faintest whiff of ozone supplanted by gas, then of something odourless and almost narcotic, he had been wearing them. It’s strange, unfamiliar to see him like this. The Norwegian sun is dim above them and in the faint, weak rays, Dirk’s eyelashes are almost white against his skin. He’s pale, too, be it from his continued seclusion or from the insufficient UV radiation. If Rose could see him now, she’d call him an abomination of the von Luschan scale. Roxy would shield her eyes and laugh. Dave just stares.

 

Neither of them says a word until he locks his car, and skids along the puddles to climb the porch steps, coming to a halt in front of him. Old wood creaks underneath his sneakers even as he shifts his balance from one leg to another, surveys Dirk flagrantly, unashamedly. Somewhere in the trees a carrion crow _kraa_ s, a familiar, guttural sound. Of course they had followed. He sighs and for a second, he swears he can see the side of Dirk’s mouth tick up minutely.

“So,” he says, aiming for brisk and just barely missing the mark. He sounds expectant, to his horror. Apprehensive.

“So,” Dirk gives back, placid.

 

He is not fooled, though. Not for a second, not when Dirk’s arms rise up a little from his sides, halfway between a greeting and a question. And when Dave steps forward he finds that he fits between those arms like he has always had, compressed against a chest just a little broader, a little firmer than he remembers. They stay like this for two, three, ten beats of the pulse in his ears, the hoarse caw of the crow.

 

.

 

INSIDE, Dirk offers him a chair and busies himself with making the two of them coffee. “Don’t have any sugar,” he explains almost apologetically, measuring out three spoons of coffee grounds into a brown filter and clicking the kettle on. It roars to life almost immediately and Dave is inanely, needlessly pleased Dirk still remembers how he takes his coffee.

“No sweat,” he replies, head craned to take the high, wood-enforced ceiling in. For someone with as little talent for home-making as Dirk had always professed himself of being incapable of, it’s surprisingly cozy. “I can survive a singular cup of joe without giving myself diabetes type two as a result. It’s gonna be an arduous endeavour, but I think I can cope without a steady intravenous drip of pure glucose right down my gullet.”

 

Preoccupied with pulling mugs out of the cupboard and milk out of the fridge, he think he can hear Dirk muffle a laugh. Right now, though, he is more preoccupied with scoping out the vicinity. The house is a bungalow, like most of the ones he’d seen on his way to Heim, the cooking area combined with a rackety wooden table and a few chipped chairs, one of which his posterior is firmly seated on. The table is pretty empty, a pen and an empty glass of water, a few newspapers in both Norwegian and English. A bottle of hand disinfectant, ironically a little smeary.

Actually, the whole kitchen seems… austere, almost. From his position he can see a few closed doors, probably leading to Dirk’s bedroom and the bathroom and a short hallway progressing into what appears to be his combined living room and workshop.

After the cultural shock and seeing Dirk’s abode, it’s almost embarrassingly good to see the telltale glint of copper wires and a nailgun. Something old, something new.

 

“Not as a means of being an arbitrary dick to your sugar cane suppliers here. I mean, it’s very…” he begins, waving his hand to indicate what he means, which is _“all of this”_ , feeling his mouth twist as he searches for words that will neither sound like he’s trying to be an asshole in the highest order of douchebaggery knighthood or just straight up condescending.

“Old?” Dirk finishes pouring the hot water into the coffee filter and places the can on the table. Then two mugs, IKEA-nondescript and white, a carton of milk. Finally, Dirk himself, on the chair at the other side of the table. “Run down?” The coffee drips, drips, drips into the jar, noise jarring enough to break the moment of silence between them until finally he can stand it no longer.

“Somber,” he says and around the coffee mug, Dirk mouth twists.

“Yeah.”

They drink their coffee.

 

“Fuck, I almost forgot,” he breaks in after a few minutes of nothing but the wind batting softly on the windows and a steadily growing choir of birds outside. From what he can here, it’s at least two crows aside from the unfamiliar chirp of thrushes and eiders, their cantankerous cries a background against those foreign calls.

“Jane says to say hi and sends her love. I mean,” he hastens to continue when Dirk looks up sharply, “everyone really does. I could barely keep them from heaping all those accolades and well wishes on me. Eventually I had to put a stopper on it or I wouldn’t have gotten through customs with all that emotional baggage.”

Shit, probably the wrong thing to say. When Dirk puts down his empty mug from where he’s been warming his hands, he looks vaguely pained. Some vicious part inside of Dave thinks _good, at least he’s not the only one_. Dirk’s motions are very precise and his voice is very crisp.

“Roxy?” he asks, the undertone in it as vast as the Orkdalsfjorden.

 

Dave looks at him, takes him in yet again in all his surprising new reticence and all his surprising old behaviours. His shoulders are a little less hunched over than they had been three years ago, the faded shirt and bleached jeans just barely concealing the way he has filled out solidly.

He’s not quite the king he used to be, strong and even-tempered with a sense of humour as wicked as his bladekind. But he’s also no longer the rake thin boy who had held Dave a lifetime ago, who told him _this is some fucked up shit alright, but it’s cool, don’t worry about it_. He wants to say those same words back to Dirk, wants to reassure him that even though they don’t understand that it’s still cool, it’s still cool, _it’s cool, don’t worry about it_.

“She was actually the one who found you by working her magic haxx0r skills to track down your IP,” he says instead. Watches Dirk’s eyes crinkle in surprised fondness, white against peach against white.

“She would have come with, no dice. But we all had a big hashing out of what I unluckily instigated shortly before the lot of our America-bound asses was about to conk the fuck out. The result was, as far as I could follow her explanation, which was also at fuckin’ five in the morning, that she felt better about sending someone who wasn’t ‘part and parcel to my 3 bffs ridorkulous nonsense’ .”

For once in his life he thinks Dirk might actually be stunned for words. But he’s somewhat smiling again, the skin around his eyes not quite so tense any more.

“Fuckin’ ridorkulous nonsense indeed,” he repeats and Dave isn’t sure whether he means to say that out loud, means to sound so soft.

 

 

 

NOT only does this Dirk he doesn’t quite recognize yet, can’t fit himself against the knobs of his spine, the edges of his personality, wake up at six in the morning, he also goes grocery shopping at an _unholy_ hour. He offers to come with, carry some groceries, but Dirk declines on account of wanting to give him some time to acclimatize and unpack. Privately, he’s sure he’s just relieved to have a little time to himself. After three years of complete and utter solitude, the only human interaction with the mailman or the cashier at the supermarket, the only sound around him the birds and the ocean, it can’t be as easy as they make it out to be.

Much less having _Dave_ of all people sprung on him like one of those ridiculously elaborate trapdoor devices the OG version of his brother used to invent. He’s aware of his tendency to go off on increasingly off-target tangents the further he slides into comfortability with someone, but Dirk has been alone a long time. Before that, even longer.

Dirk has indulged him in those vocal ventures, supplied a good foundation to more of their oral excavations, but he has also locked himself in the bathroom for hours on end, coming out with skin scalded and pruned to the point of rawness. Whether that be out of fondness for the simple input of water hitting his back and shoulders or for some other, more genially philological reason, he doesn’t know. Doesn’t want to know. They all have their various hang-ups and habits, as much as Rose prods them on it from time to time, over the years even she has grown out of the trait to question each and every of their coping mechanisms unless strictly necessary.

There is some value in biding his time brooding over whether Dirk has a need to be alone at this moment in time or just genuinely wants to give Dave his space as well, but to say it in the words of eternal grime rapper Stormzy: _it ain’t that deep_.

 

Instead, as soon as Dirk has locked the door behind him, the sound of the Honda raspy, sharp rumble fading into the distance as he puts the car in reverse and disappears down the beaten path, Dave searches. No habit is as reprehensible as nosiness, but when his last memory was of Dirk three years ago over a grainy Skype call, a text message and twenty-nine unanswered calls, redialling like a bitch only to get the same automated message again, he’s reasonably sure he’s earned some mad snooping rights.

Adult Dirk’s house is a curious mixture between his young self’s tendency for wildly bright, shittily fabricated clutter and his elder self’s penchant for red-brick minimalism. The floor is, at least, clean of any piles except for one in the bathroom, clothes heaped into the corner unceremoniously. But there are robot parts everywhere, pieces of felt on the couch, yarn strung up on a lamp besides his desk. He almost sits down on a needle when he tests out the lumpy, red couch and swears in alarm.

The kitchen has nothing but ordinary cookware, almost all of them chipped. Some of the forks are bent and he wonders whether Dirk ever used them to bend open chestplates like he did when he couldn’t find any screwdrivers or pliers at his apartment. There is an unsurprising number of knives, none of them bigger than the span of his hand. A wooden slap hung up on the inside of the door marks their purpose clearly, but he has never seen Dirk use anything but shitty ninjatos and on one memorable occasion a sacrificial dagger. To see him graduate to those kinds of knives, double-edged and hefty hilts thinning out into razor-sharp edges, would be disconcerting if he wasn’t acutely aware of their occasional penchant for violence. Rose keeps wool wrapped around her needles, crafts her scarves to substantial lengths just so she will deem it a waste of time to unravel it.

 

The bathroom is rickety and a little dusty, less clean than he had thought Dirk would be comfortable with, though the shower is scrubbed immaculately and the mirror’s only mars are brown rust spots caused from condensation. The contents of the cabinet yield nothing too surprising. A toothbrush, a razor, a very old tub of SPF50+ he snorts at, puts back with no comment necessary. A bottle of prescription Metamizole drops he must have brought with him since he can actually read its label. _Analgesic and Antipyretic_ it says and even though the possibility of a joke is so very close, Dave just frowns at it. Thumbs one peeled off corner of the label and puts it back before closing the cabinet door. For a later time, perhaps.

 

Equally, the living room harbours no secrets, though he does stumble upon a basket filled to the brim with paper waste. Upon closer inspection it is several neatly unfolded and flattened Betty Crocker SuperMoist Cake Mixes and several American newspapers. When he tugs one out (two years back when they were all throwing themselves into work as a distraction, burning the candles from both ends in board meetings, lab marathons and night shifts) and opens it to page one, he is nonplussed to see Jake’s and Jade’s faces grinning up at him, two peas in a pod in light of their deep tans and freckles. There is no need to check the other ones, though he catches an accidental glance of Rose’s face, gaunt and drawn, smothered under the headline of yet another company takeover.

In front of the single door left he hesitates briefly, then pushes it open before he can talk himself out of it. Doing the polite thing had been little more than a proverb throughout the span of his life. Neither before _The Hapenings_ nor in between nor after has he ever placed a single ounce of weight on appearing cordial, much less with Dirk. He had called his older self a _raw cut of the asshole deck_ and his brother’s parenting _weirdly stylistic and totally sociopathic_ on their first meeting, no less, and at that time meant it with a deeply underlying current of vicious intention. Now, with his brother back home in Texas, staring at the white walls of a nursing home listlessly, revenge suddenly feels very stale and Dave feels very, very old.

This body is less than thirty years old and already he can feel the strain placed on his limbs, the constraints of his world weighing them down. It is young for this life and impossibly so for their lives. Somehow he deeply hopes this will be their last go round, that after this, some whited out version of nirvana will lay their bones to rest and close their eyes with tendrils of benevolence.

 

Dirk’s room is cold and quiet, the open window blowing the first traces of winter in. He closes it, thinks about the consequences of leaving a visible trace of his presence. Leaves it closed. Defiance has always been his strong suit. The air on his tongue tastes like frost when he opens his mouth. If his phone could get signal, he would call Jade right now.

It’s perhaps this bedroom that holds the most significance, bears witness to the changes they have all gone through. According to a common, but probably falsified urban myth, they replace each and every cell in their body every seven years. It’s a whole crock of shit filled to the fecal brim with misinformation and wishful lore and he’s in no way knowledgeable enough to argue the point, but a kernel of truth is still to be found at the bottom. And they are so, so well acquainted with kernels.

How can they still cling to their old behaviours, pretend they are still the children, adults, kings and queens, then children again that they once were? What is left when seven times seven times seven times they have regenerated, built their bodies from the ground up and hit it running? They have no right to cling to what they used to be, used to pretend to be. No right to expect from others to continue on exactly as they had once found each other.

Theirs is a fading world.

 

In Dirk’s nightstand, though, the antidote is well-kept; dusty and wrapped in a piece of cloth. Sitting down heavily on the bed, he holds the shades in his hands with feather-light fingers. Pretends his palms are cupping an infant’s head or a bird’s corpse, looks at them for a very long time.

 

 

 

WHEN the door slams to signify his return, he raises his head from where he’s sprawled out on the couch attempting to decipher words in the newspaper he saw on the table earlier with an out of date NOR-EN dictionary. Dirk is standing in the doorway, hands full of bags and for all the world surveying him with a look conveying that he’s not sure how Dave got here either. This will take some time getting used to, clearly.

“Christ alive, say something before giving me the stink eye,” he complains just to fill the silence between them and give Dirk something to latch on, a conversational thread to follow. “I’m not just here to laze on your couch and quote old shit about drawing me in the likeness of South European females. There’s also a distinct possibility I look just as fine actually putting shit away like some late 19th century maid minus each and every professional get-up.”

Though they are quick to fall back into their old banter judging by the way Dirk half-angles his body towards him, listening not only with his ears but his whole posture, he is clearly distracted. Side by side they unpack the plastic bags Dirk still buys because he has always been in the habit of forgetting to take his own ones. The cashier at the supermarket has taken to scolding him every time he pays extra for them, he says, small bits and pieces of information voluntarily relayed to build the bigger picture, cogs slotting into place one after another. She always gives him the leftover bread for a fraction of the price, though, slipping bundles of lefse into his bag. Lefse, he discovers, is a type of soft flatbread made out of either grain or potatoes, easily tearable and faintly sweet. It’s also fucking delicious.

 

Long after he’s stopped chewing, Dirk continues to unpack, bags upon bags of the sweets he knows from Los Angeles, Austin, Maple Valley. Different names for all the same maxi packs of gummy bears, chewy caramel, chocolate bars. Neither of them have ever had a penchant for sweets besides appreciating the occasional Lion bar, but at this point it would almost feel inappropriate to ask.

Dirk, as he tends to be, has a habit of reading the tracks of his train of thought like he’s tracking for spoor. He follows Dave’s gaze, looks at his hands. Laughs, half-surprised, half almost reprehensive. “Not for me, man. Did you look at the date even once when y’all sat down to send you as a harbinger on this little rescue mission?”

There’s no doubt about the steel alloy buried somewhere under the diminutives and selective grouping verbiage, but it’s wrapped as nice as possible and somehow justified, so he does the wise thing and shuts his mouth. Checks his phone instead. Still no wireless connection, as if it might magically appear if he just stares hard enough, but instead today’s date. The _oh, oh shit_ he lets slip is heartfelt, Dirk’s confirming nod slightly less so, but only slightly.

“ _Oh shit_ is right,” Dirk smoothly moves on, ripping open a package of Swedish Fish (definitely not called that in fucking Scandinavia, he bets his right ear and half his tables on) to pour them into a bowl already filled with liquorice.

“Even here at the end of the world, which is for the people here as far as you can go without crossing over to Finland, there’s a whole metric shitton of kids going trick-or-treating. And you don’t want to be on the receiving side of what those reincarnated imps deem _trick_. They ain’t calling it _digg eller deng_ for nothing.”

 

There is a possibility that he understands exactly none of those words, but Dirk’s hackles seem to have dropped a little, the mental defences he pulls up slightly less rigid. They will have to talk eventually, but for now it’s a welcome respite from the careful song and dance they’ve been doing ever since Dirk saw him on that porch and his eyes shuttered down like dimmed lightbulbs.

 

After they deem several bowls appropriately filled with candy, he gladly accepts Dirk’s offer to show him the rest of the grounds. The air stings his face when the door swings open, pelting both of them with stray raindrops though only a few clouds hang in the sky. It’s normal, Dirk explains, the weather is mercurial here and the inhabitants have long since learned not to trust any prognosis. Besides Dirk in his sturdy boots and bright yellow windbreaker he feels almost overdressed, especially as he didn’t bring any shoes but the sneakers, but Dirk has always been renowned for eccentric fashion choices. When he was younger it was the wifebeater, then the neon snapbacks, now the coat he calls a _Friesennerz_ with such a horrible pronounciation Dave doesn’t know whether he’s speaking English, Norwegian or German.

Behind the house, perched precariously onto a half-cliff, one side a sharp decline whilst the other is more of a gentle slope, the land has bifurcated into an oval instep, almost something like a bay with half-rotten, algae-covered wooden stumps tied together with thick, coarse rope. What catches his attention isn’t the craftsmanship behind what could almost be called a harbour. It’s the three, four, five boats tethered to the wood, dipping up and down on the gentle roll of the waves like the cork of a bottle would in a glass of wine. Besides him, Dirk crams his hands into his pockets, shrugs a little.

“It’s all very _Red Dragon_ , I know,” he attempts to sound nonchalant.

“But after the guy who lived here before me croaked, the people here were in need of someone to fix their wherries and brigs. Part of why I got the house so cheap, really.”

 

For a moment, he’s sorely tempted to call him a nerd with all the fondness he can muster, the way he did when Dirk first showed him all the sheer amount of horse posters in his old room, the way Dirk retaliated when he discovered his interest in all things dead, old and new, the permanent smell of formaldehyde cloying up his non-godly duds. But they’re not at that point yet, even after all their lighthearted back-and-forth earlier. There’s a modicum of wariness he realizes that stems not only from Dirk but also from himself. It’s an uncomfortable revelation, not unlike admitting to his own share of fault in a situation he’s previously blamed on the other party. It feels like he’s still fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, arguing with a girl about sprites and alter egos and his own responsibility in a failed relationship. Like he’s still fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, telling Dirk _when it comes to the subject of him the bar’s already pretty low, dude_ just to shift some of that anger from his shoulders onto someone else, _just once,_ _just some perfectly innocent dude havin’ to take the brunt of this shit_.

Theirs is a fading world, yes, but there is no doubt he doesn’t ever want to go back to that.

Instead, he just shrugs, kicks a rock aside and inadvertently takes a step back into the soaked ground, sinking in a few inches.

“Don’t know about that, dude. Seems to me you’ve filled some real important NPC role that those people need. In no time you’ll be upgrading weapons for wandering protagonists and sending them on fetch quests for outlandish ingredients.”

From the curve of Dirk’s smile, he knows he’s succeeded.

“Maybe being a NPC isn’t so bad,” he agrees. _For the time being_ , neither of them say.

 

They stand, surveying the coastline. Under them, the cliffs very quietly, very slowly crumble.

 

 

 

THE jetlag finally finds him, catches him hard and fast after they wander back to the house after an extensive tour of the grounds and he ends up passing out on the couch, the sun painting weak white stripes through the window lattices and coating Dirk’s back in iridescent afterimages where he sits at his desk, working on something he only gave a half-jumbled explanation of when he asked, something about carburators and exhaust engines.

He falls asleep to the jarring scrape of metal against metal and wakes hours later with Dirk’s coat draped over him lieu of a blanket, a note pinned to the couch cushion with a delicate butterfly knife as thin as a sheet of paper. Despite himself, he feels almost at home upon seeing it. Something old, something new.

Bro, the note reads, uncharacteristically black.

Out on the porch. If you feel like it.

A little smaller, a little more haphazardly under it:

Wi-Fi password is YdmiSCYrmlaDB

 

From outside the front door he can see a faint light glowing, yellow against the pitch darkness. With a start he realizes it must be late evening at best, night at worst. He’s been sleeping for hours without the slightest of ideas how much time has passed. It’s a rarity within itself. When he switches his phone on, the light is so blinding he has to shield his eyes despite the shades hanging crooked on his nose. It’s at 54%, good enough to let the others know he isn’t dead in a ditch or kidnapped by Norwegian elks. Or moose. He’s not actually sure which ones belong in Canada and which ones in Scandinavia, but it does not stop him from fumbling to type the password in, mumbling half-slurred expletives when he gets the seemingly random string of letters wrong once, twice.

Twelve missed calls, twenty-three unread messages. Well, shit.

Most of them are either from Roxy, John or Jade. Rose has sent a few too that look positively alarming. Jake, to his surprise has kept mum, true to what he said.

Jane has sent the most recent one, Norway’s weather forecast for the next week. An Amazon link for a raincoat accompanied by a smiley. Something aches just below his collarbone.

 

He decides that perhaps, Dirk can enjoy his solitude for a few minutes longer. It’s not urgent.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began bothering gutsyGumshoe [GG] \--

TG: man are you right about the weather i swear down ive lost half of my leg in a puddle as deep as the marianas trench  
TG: sometimes at night i am almost sure i can still hear it squelching my name  
GG: Dave!  
TG: daves the name rescue missions are my game  
GG: We had been worried you had lost your phone somewhere. Or worse, lost your way with only that rickety GPS to give you directions.  
TG: nah turns out bumfuck north norway doesnt exactly have free wifi much less support 4g mobile data  
TG: as charming as it is of course  
TG: i think i saw the bullerbü children at least two times on my way to heim  
GG: That’s Swedish, you know. :B Astrid Lindgren wasn’t Norwegian.  
TG: youre the expert on pre war children books not me im not sure ive ever read anything except that one of the brothers that both died  
TG: something something about either suicide or an incurable illness  
GG: The Brothers Lionheart. Dad read it to me and I remember crying my eyes out! Not a suitable topic for a gal the age I was back then.  
GG: But in any way! I trust you have not indeed been kidnapped by little blonde children?  
GG: Not that I know whether a typical Norwegian child is really blond. I haven’t ever been to Scandinavia, at least not, well. In this timeline. I could just be going out on a limb here, hoo hoo!  
TG: im no better off than you are ive seen exactly three norwegian people except dirk and the physiognomy really varies  
TG: it didnt help that one was like  
TG: approximately a century old and the third was buried under twenty layers because its balls to the wall freezing here  
GG: I figured I was likely just entertaining old-fashioned ideas here.  
GG: But that means you’ve seen Dirk?? Spoken with him too?  
TG: im currently camped out on his couch  
TG: which i would rate nine out of ten springs solely because the tenth one is poking me in the unmentionables  
GG: Hoo hoo hoo!  
TG: but yeah i found him through the help of above mentioned michelin man in wads of fabric  
TG: wasnt all that hard once i pulled the picture out its almost like a place with less than 750 inhabitants might actually notice someone new moving in  
GG: Not that isn’t fine and dandy.  
TG: i feel as if there is a but a comin  
GG: But, Dirk. How is he? Did he talk to you about, well. Anything at all?  
TG: janey i dont really know weve kept it appropriately pg 13 and talked about stuff like shit i dont know norwegian halloween and his house  
TG: it just feels somewhat well  
TG: awkward to spring this on him all of a sudden like were going from zero to a hundred in about three seconds and the brakes are broken  
GG: Dave.  
TG: yes  
GG: I think you can testify that I love and cherish Dirk as one of my dearest friends.  
TG: oh man  
GG: But he just up and LEFT just like that! No address, no explanation, no nothing!  
GG: If anything, he should feel chagrined about denying us answers in regards to the events that lead to his sudden disappearance!  
GG: He owes us, me and you and the others, that at least!  
TG: jane  
GG:  
GG: I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for you to take the brunt of this, I shouldn’t have lashed out like that.  
TG: naw i kind of get it i mean yall were always a close knit bundle if you pardon the shittily inappropriate yarn metaphor  
GG: I was with Roxy when we got news. You should have seen her face. And the fallout when months passed without any message.  
GG: And I just… I wish he would have at least TALKED to us about it. If we couldn’t have helped, at least then we would have tried to listen.  
GG: Maybe then he would not have felt compelled to leave. I just can’t bear the idea of him out there all by himself, no matter how angry I am he just left like that.  
TG: jesus fucking christ on a pogo stick  
TG: you really are a good person arent you  
GG: I think good and bad are subjective terms. Was it a shit move of Dirk to just vanish? Yes. Does it mean he’s a fundamentally bad person? I don’t think so.  
TG: maybe youre right  
TG: i mean id be lying if i said i didnt also sort of want some answers to the houdini act he pulled  
TG: but as i said i cant exactly just go and ask him why he left can i  
GG: I think you can. I think in this instance, frankness might just be the best policy. Is he still up? It must be awfully late where you are.  
TG: yeah hes outside  
GG: Perhaps, if you feel up to it, now might be the moment. I don’t want to influence you on what to do, but now is as good as any, if I’m being honest.  
TG: yeah  
TG: maybe  
TG: you know what yeah  
TG: i know im at times the master of bongo playing various conversational shrubbery but i feel in this scenario even my world renowned accolades centered on beating around the bush are a little shorthanded  
TG: ill message you all either tonight or tomorrow depending how long it takes and what the outcome is  
GG: Take your time. The both of you.  
GG: I will keep the hivemind at bay!  
TG: yeah you go and tame those wild and raring beasts  
TG: shes beauty shes grace  
GG: Why is there a moustache on her face.  
GG: :{B !  
TG: B{ )  


\-- gutsyGumshoe [GG] ceased being bothered by turntechGodhead [TG] \--

 

And to think that was the easy part.

 

Time travel has always been a touchy subject for him. Always, especially since the last days of the game when everything had been progressing at two different speeds like a stereo track: stretched out like a melted marshmallow, endless days of waiting and wondering in one ear, a blinding, terrifying rush in the other. Jade had turned grimbark and he’d looked at her, dark face and too-bright eyes, that same face that he-not-he had loved once, that mouth he had kissed once. Looked at her and told her that the use of learning time travel is learning how to avoid it.

There is no doubt about it. Everyone gets their multidimensional concave hourglass of allotted time trickling back into itself. He’s just gotten a little bit more lucky than everyone else in that aspect, but only a little. As much as he was able play with it, slow it down and speed it up minutely to make use of it, actively resetting has never been a viable option, not after the consequences, blood in his throat and a sword nailing a body through the floor.

He had wanted more time before Lord English. They all had.

 

He wants more time now. And he’s reasonably sure Dirk wants that too. But for once in his life he feels the flow’s pressing urge, the deafening percolation of sand and clockwork threatening to burst his eardrums. _  
_ “Shut up,” he murmurs, half under his breath and he’s not sure whether he’s talking to Aradia, Karkat or Hephaestus, not sure whether he even wants to know.

“I’m goin’, I’m _goin’_ , shut the _fuck_ up.”

 

 

 

DIRK is still on the porch when he opens the door. Still not wearing his shades, eyes half-narrowed as he stares into the darkness intently, as if he’s matching someone watching the lit house from the bushes gaze for gaze, second for second. For a second, Dave wonders what he sees in the shadows, if it’s something, someone he recognizes. Then the moment is broken and Dirk straightens, turns around to look at him. It’s too cold for mosquitos, but a few bugs surround him nevertheless, tiny dark speckles in the warm, yellow halo of the lamp above him.

Stretching one leg out, he hooks his ankle around the leg of the second chair and pulls it in to come to a halt in front of Dave.

“Good to see you awake from your jetlag induced coma. Come on, have a seat, you’ll wear the planks out with all your shifting.”

 

With Dirk’s talkativeness at an all-time high, he has no choice left but to sit down in the chair. It’s an old basket chair, round and low, the wickerwork creaking auspiciously as he lowers himself onto it. Once he’s positioned himself, Dirk turns around again to continue his face-off with the array of bushes, content with the two of them remaining in silence. How different he is now from the boy with whom he sat on a rooftop once and waited out three measured beats with gritted teeth. The boy who asked him what was wrong, asked him if they were cool, told him he was sorry, sorry, sorry, _this is some fucked up shit alright, but it’s cool, don’t worry about it_.

Somewhere deep in his neuronal networks, a spark lights. Transmission, synapsis, motoneurons.

“You remember shortly before we fought Slick and Jack?” he says, unhurried. Time is on his side, after all. Behind him, Hephaestus hisses, low and gravelly.

“And we attempted to answer each other’s questions? Well, tried before it inevitably descended into us just yakking about each other’s ancestry and hobbies like two well-bred show dolphins.”

 

Dirk makes no indication he has heard him, then nods, resting his elbow on the chair’s armrest to support his head.

“I remember that,” he replies eventually, something almost mirthful in his voice despite the undercurrent of fond wariness.

“Lightning rounds you called it, said you got it from Roxy on your first meeting.”

And then, because Dirk is, _impossibly_ , still Dirk:

“You’re wanting to do one now? ‘Cause it sure sounds like you got those bolts down on lock just waiting for the fire command.”

 

He doesn’t move his head, but when he nods in return he knows Dirk has seen it. The chair is comfortable, but the wicker itches and it creaks as he shifts restlessly.

“Yeah, let’s. I can go ahead and start it off. Why Heim?”

 

It’s an easy one, a good introductory question because no doubt, he will never achieve the level of straightforwardness Jane or Rose possess. But judging by Dirk’s expression, almost wistful, there might never be a question that _doesn’t_ rattle him.

 

“It’s real fuckin’ stupid,” his brother replies, sounding for all the world just sixteen and contrite, thirteen and angry.

“Heim is Norsk for home. I thought after all this harsh dose of realism we had been slam dunked into like a vat of cold water— well. Figured it was time to indulge my self-feeding sentimentalism a little.

He nods, because it’s the only thing he can do, he certainly doesn’t _understand_. And then, without waiting for further elaboration, because he can just see Dirk’s head beginning to turn and he _needs_ this, needs to get it off his chest because it can’t go on like this, they can’t spend the rest of their lives treating each other with polite distance—

 

“Why did you leave?”

 

Dirk’s expression doesn’t change. It’s almost as if he had been preparing for this question. Knowing him, it’s very likely foolish to assume he hasn’t extensively thought about it.

A beat of silence, then:

 

“Because I wanted to.”

 

This is not the answer he has been expecting. He did not travel almost thirty hours for _want_ , he did not chase Dirk, chase his brother halfway across the world after three years and three solitary emails sent from a dead account for fucking _want_.

Dirk must read his face as well as he used to, because he laughs, dry, humourless.

“It ain’t really the answer you came here, is it?”

 

“Want _what_ ,” Dave finally responds and his confusion, anger, dissatisfaction must bleed into his voice so crassly that Dirk actually turns his head to look at him. Concerned. Of all things, he looks _concerned_.

“Wanted to be alone? To get away from us? To try and become a fuckin’ hermit? Tell me, because I sure hope that you damn well _found_ it after the literal shit manger you’ve put us through. You couldn’t have fuckin’ moved to North Dakota to be a hermit there, it had to be the apparent end of European civilization with, oh, let me see, no messages for three years _?_ ”

 

For once in his life, he wishes for a blade in his hand. He wishes for metal and blood and loud noises like he hasn’t done since his brother looked at him with no sense of recognition, looked right _through_ him with blank eyes and a blank mind. Neither of them have touched a blade to strife since they woke up, thirteen again, eternally thirteen in their beds in 2009. He had screamed back then and he wants to scream now.

Next to him, Dirk rubs his temple. It’s a familiar motion, one he’s witnessed for a million lifetimes plus this one, and for some reason it makes him even angrier and _oh God he misses Karkat so much_.

 

“For what it’s worth,” his brother finally, measured and steady like he’s recited this monologue in front of the mirror. “I never meant to make it appear as if I had died.”

 

“Yes, I know,” he continues when Dave opens his mouth, incensed anew. His mouth draws shut sharply, a painful click of enamel on enamel, but Dirk is already speaking.

“It ain’t worth shit. And I’m afraid I can’t offer up anything that’ll magically make this all alright again, but I’m not going to revel in self-pity here since it ain’t doing jack except further my wish for forgiveness.”

 

When it is clear Dave is listening, his voice softens a little. The way he had crooned unintelligible words into Jake’s ears just to make him flush, the way he had talked to Eridan, patient and tolerant.

“I’m gonna say this though: I wouldn’t have left if there wasn’t any other I could have coped with this and I would have talked to one of you about it if I had thought it was gonna do even one single ounce of good.”

 

“But _why_ did you leave?” he breaks in, unable to refrain himself any further. Something bites into his hands and when he looks down, he finds his fingers clenched around the armrest, sharp wicker cutting into his fingertips, white against blood against straw.

“What was so terrible that you couldn’t mention it to anyone?”

 

Dirk’s laugh is short, sardonically brisk and it cuts better than the wicker slicing his fingers.

“Because I _couldn’t_. None of you would have under—“

 

“ _Don’t_ you fucking dare saying no one would have understood it, you sanctimonious prick,” Dave cuts him off. He can feel himself going red until only his lips are disturbingly, bloodlessly white and he knows Dirk’s look is one of concern. It doesn’t stop him from sneering, though.

“You didn’t even try it, which means you have officially forfeited each and every opportunity to remain on that high horse you rode in on.”

 

Impossibly, a smile twitches at Dirk’s lips and he shakes his head.

“I suppose that noble steed has long since left the stable without me.”

 

Then, a little quieter:

“I couldn’t do it any more.”

When he notices Dave’s raised eyebrows, he merely shrugs in return, crosses one leg over the other, effortlessly elegant even in frayed pajama bottoms and a wifebeater.

“After we fuckin’ woke up, thirteen again after all the lives we had lived, the things we had seen, built, destroyed. After all the wars and sieges, the births and deaths, the hundred and thousand of lifetimes we’ve spent building Skaia and razing it down. And we were fuckin’ _thirteen and everything was gone_ , I—“

His breathing has accelerated and he stops himself, closes his eyes. Just a foot away, he looks impossibly distant.

“I tried doing it, I really tried. Tried being a normal, non-magical kid. No royalty, no blood magic, no martial honour. But all the time, all the fuckin’ time I suppose I just felt.”

 

“I felt like a fake. An imposter living a life I wasn’t meant for. And eventually it got so worse that I couldn’t look at you all, couldn’t talk to you without feeling like someone took the Dirk that belonged here, someone that was happy with building increasingly elaborate and advanced technology, getting pop culture chops and studyin’ fuckin’ _philosophy_ , and replaced him with me.”

 

Dave’s mouth is as dry as a cotton ball all of a sudden and he has to clear his throat once, twice before speaking, an ugly, tearing sound.

“But,” he tries hoarsely, has to cough again.

“But why didn’t you ever try and talk to us about it? Even if we weren’t feeling the same, one of us coulda--”

 

Something in Dirk’s eyes _snaps_ and his jaw sets in a violent clench, tension rippling up his torso.

“Because none of you _ever_ wanted to talk about it! It was a collective decision that we wouldn’t bring it up, period. After a while y’all were pretty damn content with the lives you got and every time we accidentally dug up some memories from our time in-game and post-game Skaia, everyone would just get that _look_.”

He knows the look. Muted grief and adrenaline, pupils dilated but mouths tight. Something old, something new.

 

“So I left,” Dirk continues now that someone, something has got him on that rolling stone, taking down everything in its path. His fingers are twisting in a way he hasn’t seen him do since the first time he ever saw Roxy’s corpse, besieged and bloody before Jane revived her.

“Left this _stupid fuckin’_ note about just needing time for myself because I couldn’t stand they way we were talking about Skaia like it was some dead relative. Made for Europe because I knew you wouldn’t look for me there.”

He laughs, and this time there is nothing patient or gentle in it.

“And in a way I _did_ need time, I guess. I thought it was better for everyone too, not just me. But after a year passed and I thought of coming back to you all, but then I realized just _reappearing_ on one of your doorsteps like the biggest fucking douchebag, all à la _hey you guys miss me_ wasn’t really an option.”

 

“So you sent the email,” Dave intercedes. In contrast his voice feels curiously calm. Something heavy has settled over his body like a weighted blanket, grounding him until his own heartbeat is stable and Hephaestus isn’t roaring in his ears anymore.

The bugs have died, he notices with a flicker of interest, the steady semicircles around the lamp have drawn their course.

“To make sure we know you weren’t dead yet.”

 

Dirk’s half-profile, shaded with shadows and exhaustion, nods.

“Yeah. Didn’t encrypt it because I somewhat expected to Roxy to track me down. But not get in contact, much less one of you coming after me. I said I wouldn’t delve into needless self-pity, but purely objectively I woulda understood if you would have been sick of looking.”

 

Now.

The air feels electric for a brief second, sand kernels almost tangible in the air and from the way Dirk’s head snaps up, Dave knows he feels it too.

This is the moment.

 

“I dream about them all the time,” he says, voice as low and steady as he can manage.

“I see them in the constellations, next to me in the mirror, behind my lids when I close my eyes. I talk to Karkat and Terezi more than I talk to Rose at times and I _live_ with Rose.”

Besides himself, he can see Dirk sag slightly, but he presses on regardless.

“And I miss it all so, _so_ much. I miss Derse and its antiquated court politics, our planets and my clockwork. Sometimes I still think I can fly if I just believe hard enough like I was some fucked up oversized Peter Pan fairy. But then I wake up in the morning and I feel like my bones are as brittle as corals.”

Sand, trickling into an hourglass of truth.

“I can’t look at babies because all they do is remind me of the perfect little fuckups we created from our gene pool, how every fuckin’ child has our mistakes somewhere written along their DNA.”

And he sure hopes the sound waves make their way to Dirk, the currents pushing through.

“And I’d give anything, _anything_ to be back because after all those past lives, I ask myself what it was all for if everything we’ve ever had is just going to be written over, deleted and locked away in some cosmic data bank.”

 

Dirk, next to him, is very still.

 

“I’m starting to feel like that stupid ass whale,” he continues and to his horror, he can feel his voice beginning to thicken. “The one singing at fifty-two hertz and no one can fuckin’ understand it because what do I know, whale frequency is fuckin’ _idiotic_. Like an alien. A whalien.”

 

Dirk’s voice, so low he can barely understand.

“There’s a song about that,” he repeats, nonsensically thoughtful and suddenly they are both laughing. Half-choked and desperate, but laughing nevertheless. He’s clutching the armrests and Dirk’s wiping his eyes, neither of them are entirely convinced it’s just from the strain, but they do not mention it.

 

Finally, finally, it abates and they are left half-hunched in their chairs. Somewhere in the darkness of the treetops the last crow of the night calls. Or perhaps it’s the first one of the day.

“Dirk,” he says finally when he trusts himself to speak, when he’s sure Terezi is no longer hanging over his shoulder cackling.

“The point of this whole shebang was that if you want to be alone, we will leave you alone. But you knew what Roxy could do and you left the email unencrypted on purpose like you said. Let _yourself_ be found. I feel like that’s a sign the whole lumberjack hermit thing maybe isn’t working out so great for you.”

 

“I don’t know,” Dirk mumbles from where he’s rubbing his face with his sleeve. He doesn’t have the Sweet Bro tattoo anymore, not in this one and the sight of bare skin is as always slightly disconcerting. So much gone. But also so much remaining.

“I really thought flannel and I had a future.”

 

Not in this life, he thinks. No, not in this one.

 

 

 

THE emotional jetlag their conversation leaves him with, cumulative clouds of thought and speculation swirling in his mind, a counterclockwise rotation down the drain, keeps him awake well into the wee hours of the morning. He stays seated on the couch after they relocate inside, Dirk blowing the lamp out with something almost like reluctance, after the bedroom door clicks shut. The house is so old it creaks from time to time, old bones and old wood in the walls. From Dirk’s desk he can see the faint red glow of a cheap LED lamp he must have forgotten to turn off. Or perhaps it’s a permanently active part, a remnant of the mechanical monsters he built ten, twenty stories tall, hanging face-down from his version of Unreal Air.

And he won’t say he doesn’t miss that Dirk with fierce abandon, the version of him that always seemed to be more a spark than an ember, catching fire with calculated chill. Neither is he the steady flame of their older days and nights, burning midnight oil hunched over his computer; half-asleep but desperately struggling to keep his eyes open on the throne. Nowadays, surrounded by the sea, he seems diminished, his burning passion for everything and anything dampened. All his life he’d been running from the ocean and now he’s ruined all the waves. And the waves won’t let him find them.

They’ve all changed, they’ve all faded and fallen apart and pieced themselves together laboriously. When Roxy and John broke up after almost sixty years, everyone had been muted and disbelieving, watching the trainwreck unfold like an unravelled piece of string, but Dirk had been angry, had been _alive_. He’s alive now too, but something in him seems almost extinguished.

 

The door opens.

It’s still Dirk, always Dirk, three in the morning and he’s looking at Dave with the kind of look he used to give him when they were alone on Derse and he, inexplicably, fucked up again. It chills him down to his bones and then warms him inside out, something visceral and deep-set. The kind of look that says _for someone so incredibly smart you sure like to play dumb_ and _please don’t ever leave_ and _fucked up shit alright, but it’s cool_.

“I can hear you thinkin’ from over here,” Dirk says finally, eyelids heavy and voice just the slightest bit slurred from exhaustion and half-aborted slow wave sleep.

“An’ I thought, hey, ain’t that my birthright. Fuckin’ Prince of Brooding Heart over here.”

 

Dirk is more a bleeding heart than he would ever let anyone catch on to, but it’s hard to deny him anything when he looks sleep-soft and just the slightest bit irritated. Dave stands, watches Dirk scrub a hand over his eyes, snuffle a little to clear his clogged nose. His face is just the slightest bit puffy from lying down.

“Come to bed,” he finally says before turning around and ambling back into the darkness of his bedroom. A pause. A hourglass tipping over.

He follows.

Is it much later when they are both situated under Dirk’s sheets, the curve of his spine a gentle rolling hill under the blanket, his back to Dave is when he finally speaks.

“You know when we had that lightning round, the almost last one before everything went to hell in a handbasket and you never actually gave me a straight answer as to the source of our precipitous mad powers?”

He think the blanket snorts, but can’t be too sure. Then Dirk gives an aborted groan, yawns. The sheets rustle.

“Yeah, I remember that pretty clearly. We got to talkin’ about my brother. Somewhere along those lines I’m pretty sure I told you this weird fantasy of us two old geezers. You, living a quiet life tending to your fossils, and me doing the same with my dear collection of simple-minded chat robots fixated on puppet ass.”

 

“Almost exactly worded the same way,” he says as wryly as he can muster and this time, Dirk definitely snorts.

“But I was more thinking about me ripping into you as Bro’s pseudo stand-in.”

Before he spent hundreds of lifetimes coming to terms with how much had been his brother and how much the JuJu’s entity as Caliborn’s soul.

Before he woke up a thirteen year old, gangly and coltish and Bro had been in the living room staring at his hands, looking up at him with something like mild alarm.

Besides him, Dirk has stilled. The subject is still a point they have never dwelled on for too long, not after the first few years. And despite his burgeoning curiosity, he has never asked for what Dave did not freely offer. It’s one of the pins that mark his traits and character, a network of red miles and red string woven together, making up the essence of what is _D. Strider, Prince of Heart, King of Derse, Destroyer of Souls, Dirk_.

“I told you I was glad I found you because you seemed to be the only person I could actually _tell_ that shit without taking a sideways axel of my proverbial handle.”

 

“Something about a motto,” Dirk says, shifting to face him, and he sounds so dangerously close to the brink of sleep that he almost, almost feels bad. But if he doesn’t go through with it now, he’s not sure if he ever can. And they are too old for would-bes and what-ifs. Could-haves and not-evers.

 

“Sure did. You said it already was, should be on our family crest.”

And then, when Dirk doesn’t seem to respond, his breath already shallow and hot against Dave’s hand:

“Aufer mihi ista pro mea existentia, s’what you said.”

A beat of darkest silence, but he can make out Dirk’s slack features, that sweet October haze.

“Why are you telling me this?”

 

Dave’s voice softens in his gaze and he reaches out a hand. Touches Dirk’s temple, fingers grazing over thin-skinned warmth and the strong beat of a pulse.

“I’m pretty grateful for your existence too, you know.”

 

He’s not sure who kisses whom first, but he’s suddenly half-crouched over Dirk, cupping the back of his skull with something like reverence. Strokes two cool thumbs over the bridge of his nose, the freckled line of his cheekbones, watches his lids gently twitch, then slowly drift shut. The soft, blue-veined skin of his eyelids impossibly freckled, dotted and marred with no silver scars to bisect the vast expanse of undamaged skin.

And then Dirk kisses back, the sweet slide of his mouth against his own like Rose’s lips on his temple, a blessing and a plea, but _oh_ , so unlike it. So very unlike it.

 

They kiss, one half-kneeling, the other pushed up on his elbows, kiss until Dave’s lips feel swollen and numb and Dirk is yawning into his mouth with barely disguised fatigue. He doesn’t resist Dave draping the blankets over him, stuffing them under him like he’s seen John’s father do, pressing another kiss just to the corner of his mouth, just to feel those lips faintly twitch into a smile under his touch.

“Sweet dreams, Timaeus,” he croons and Dirk’s brow twitches, but he’s already too far gone to protest, his breath evening out until it’s the only noise left in the room, deep and a little wheezy.

 

Then, only after checking that the windows are shut and morning is already creeping through the blinds, he closes his eyes too. They sleep unhindered by demiurges, the apocryphal cries of the crows mixed with those of Dirk’s gulls a soft undercurrent to the howling of the wind.

 

 

 

HALLOWEEN is, Dirk explains during a late breakfast, not actually that prevalent in Scandinavia, but what with the recent influx of American influence through media, even the children, population 711 plus the two of them, seem to be enthused for it.

“They’d pelt the house with eggs if we didn’t offer them anything,” he says through a mouthful of laks og eggerøre. Behind him, Dave can see the Nicodemean version of Yaldabaoth rise, the Demiurge dipping over his shoulder to wrap one solidly thick coil of scales around his neck.

Dirk does not seem to be too bothered, so he makes no mention of it either.

 

“But in between the whole _keeping minors from toilet papering our abode just because they feel like it and can’t be punished for it_ there’s also the matter of the Winternights usually falling around Halloween,” Dirk continues, half-rising to pour more milk in Dave’s coffee cup unbidden, diluting the black-to-red-to brown to sweet caramel.

“It’s a span of days from end of October to beginning of November. Pretty much the Norse equivalent of Samhain, which you should be familiar of in regards to Welshscalibur—“

 

(“Yes, I’m aware it’s shitty fake Welsh and actually named Caledfwlch, and also that you have no further experience with Celtic mythology besides your secret Welsh powers,” he compromises after Dave mumble-protests through the Jarlsberg cheese he’s eating. There’s a possibility he might actually look _endeared_.)

 

“And also the American Halloween falls smack-dab in the of those days,” Dirk finishes, looking for all the world as if they didn’t just commit the crime of great cultural insensibility to the whole country of Wales and also Dave himself.

“Nobody actually believes in this sort of shit anymore. It’s just like when people first get into paganism, they want to take all the fancy-ass parts like the altar and the spells and disregard the basics behind it just to burn some incense and ask for an entity’s protection.”

 

“I don’t know the first thing about either paganism or mythology except weirdly obscure Alternian facts,” he confesses unbothered, sweeping crumbs from the table, his other hand half-cupped to catch them before they fall onto the floor. It’s a habit his brother had, back when he was able to speak and act as an independent agent (was he ever?) and in light of his living situation Dave always thought it was some sort of mockery of the general dishevel in the apartment. But perhaps it’s that. Perhaps it’s never been that. Adulthood has always been a strange, foreign concept, a proverbial Peter Pan around all his friends grown up, even in their young bodies, but. It seems to have snuck up on him when he was looking the other way. He’s never been too fond of responsibility, but with Dirk he reckons he might just be alright.

“So if you had a point you were getting to, you better accelerate your whole venture.”

 

“Quest,” Dirk corrects without looking up. For the first time in what seems like years, his shades are crammed on top of his head, a little dusty but none worse for the wear. His eyelashes fan out, bristly shadows against the skin of his eyelids. He looks, well. He looks like Dirk and also not and Dave has to swallow once, hard and uncomfortably aware of how reverent he himself must appear.

“A quest is a trip to accomplish something or get something. An adventure is just, y’know. You don’t go out there and look for something, it comes to you somewhere along the end of your trip.”

He doesn’t dare ask what his journey had been, but by the smile crinkling Dirk’s eyes, it’s not hard to.

 

“Your _quest_ then,” he grouses with no true heat behind it.

“Are you saying that today of all days something might, y’know. Come out?”

 

That stops Dirk and for a moment, he looks almost vaguely thoughtful, wiping his hands on a kitchen towel and opening the newspaper. It’s the one from yesterday, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

“I don’t think so,” he says absentmindedly, perusing crisply printed articles in a language Dave does not care to understand.

“It’s all too far away and fading already. There’s no real possibility of anything from either Skaia or Alternia making its way through the gaps between the universes.”

 

And then, because he must have seen Dave’s expression, game but just slightly resigned:

“That doesn’t mean we are not _susceptible_ to it. I’m not saying the seals loosening and the borders between spectral conscience is an actual _thing_ just because I’m too sceptical to indulge into something so wholesomely superstitious, but.”

 

“But?” Dave echoes. When he looks up, he sees Dirk sighing a little, but it’s a fond one.

  
“But if there was ever a time to try and find out whether you could dip your fingers into the space pool between metaverses, _now_ would probably be a good time.”

There’s no need to respond anything for Dirk to incline his head with something that’s closer to amusement than anything he’s seen so far.

“I thought you’d be up for that.”

 

 

 

AFTER breakfast, Dirk vanishes down to the miniature harbour behind the house to fix his boats, but he strongly suspects he wants to give him some time to think it over, possibly call Rose. It can’t be later than three, four o’clock in the morning, but she immediately accepts his outgoing call. He can see the 10.000 Lux lamp behind her, the potted plant on the other side of her office faintly visible. Even at this late hour, she is radiant in burnt sienna.

“You’re up late,” he says in lieu of a greeting. Her nonplussed reaction on the matter belies her long acquaintance with him.

“The grind doesn’t stop just because you’re not around to see it,” she replies mildly, then an actual smile transforms her face. In the moment, she looks so much like Roxy, like Dirk. He wonders how much of that similarity transforms his own features when he is genuinely happy.

She tells him that it’s good to see him with an amount of softness he would normally rib her over, but after two days of radio silence, he’s almost surprised himself with how much he misses her.

 

They swap mundane stories, her experience with her board and its perpetually cantankerous inhabitants against his description of Norwegian landscape. Neither of them talk about Dirk except briefly, almost remotely when she carefully, modulatedly asks whether the two of them are well.

 

A moment passes in which he ponders the question, then nods minutely.

“I think so. I mean, I doubt we’re quite there yet, but it’s a quest.”

 

Her eyes soften at that and when she bends forward, he can see the slightly smudged lipstick, black lines at the corners of her mouth. Their newfound humanity never fails to endear her to him, no matter how long it has been. He thinks he would feel the same about Rose even when they are eighty or eight hundred.

“I’m almost certain a quest where the trip is more important than the goal is a journey,” she says quietly. In return, he tells her she should have been a writer instead of a corporate drone. By her sad smile, it’s probably true, but she still hits back by reminding him of his upcoming deadlines two days from now.

 

He tells her she’ll make a terrific CEO with surprising tenderness before they hang up. By the genuineness of her smile, it was the right choice.

Nothing she says he doesn’t already know, the quiet beat of _be well_ and _we are here if you need us_ and _but when the time is right, please come back_ unspoken, the thousands of years of bonds and holding onto each other as tightly as they can. Their blood, their home, their family.

 

After that, he ambles around the house aimlessly, looks at the work he has to do. Attempts to storyboard a comic, puts it down after twenty minutes. In the end, he sends an email to his editor, probably more lacklustre worded than he really should, and goes to look for Dirk.

He’s in the back yard instead of down at the dock, laying down stones next to each other with his sleeves shoved up, his trousers already muddy from the trudge through the dirt. When he comes closer, he raises a hand from where he’s kneeling, but does not look up.

With chilling clarity Dave realizes the structure. A circle of stones, almost perfectly aligned. Wood in the middle, forming a massive campfire. Two hours in and the sun is already past its zenith. The atmosphere in the air is jarring, eerie. Dirk is right. They might not believe in Halloween or Samhein or Vetrnætr, but on a day like this, the margins of their universes seem to blur. Fade into each other. If ever there was a night to try and reach out towards Karkat, the others, this night it is.

Now is the place. Now is the time.

 

He drops a kiss on the base of Dirk’s neck just because he can, that pale expanse of skin over the bumps of his spine. Smells the clean sweat, laundry detergent, the promise of ash and smoke in his wake. In return, Dirk turns his head to angle himself towards Dave, one hand wrapped around the back of his thigh.

 

Together they survey the Norwegian sea and a faint if Dirk at times stood here and heard him calling out through the deep Pacific blue. If he ever heard his voice

From somewhere in the distance he can see the lights go on. One, two, three orange balls of light bobbing up and down. They must be behind them too.

 

There is no telling what this night will bring. Children and imps, _knask eller knep_.

But Dirk is at his side and the vast expanse of the sea behind them, its breath long and drawn-out. A denizen’s benevolent blessing.

The air is filled with the smell of the ocean, salt crystals collecting on their eyelashes and the first few snowflakes melting on their lips.

 

 

Something old, something new.

 

 

 


End file.
